The Winters(2)

Mostly our days were languid; sometimes I’d plan a museum tour or we’d take a long drive past ruins. Our nights were spent reading rather than watching TV, sharing the couch even if armchairs were available, our toes gently touching. There were few conflicts, though I was no longer naive enough to believe two people as different as we were, who’d spent as much time together as we had, would never bicker. But the truth was we were still getting to know each other.

Waiting for the omelet to thicken, I poked my head into the bedroom, resisting the urge to caress that thatch of dark hair that I had come to love in a quiet, calm way, a marked difference from how I loved just a short while ago. Hard to believe it had been less than a year since I’d met Max Winter, a man whose love seized me by the shoulders and shook me out of a state of dormancy, and who ushered in another emotion I had yet to meet in my young life: jealousy, the kind that grows like kudzu, vining around the heart, squeezing all the air out, fusing with my thoughts and dreams, so that by the time I understood what was happening to me it was almost too late.

I carefully closed the bedroom door, padded across the cool tile floors of the living area, with its dark armoires and overstuffed armchairs, and threw open the musty blackout curtains. I stepped barefoot onto the hot stone terrace, the sun so bright it hurt my eyes. In the distance, warm air steamed off the sea. From below, I could hear the Spanish-speaking shopkeepers already arguing over sidewalk space, and I was gut-punched by long-ago memories of a mother who sang to me in her mother’s language and a father with sunburned shoulders, pulling fish out of the sea, their silver bodies violently jackknifing on the scarred deck of the boat we once lived on, our sleeping quarters the size of the smallest pantry you could find at Asherley. I could have fainted from an old grief. Here they were again, coming at me from afar, watery mirages of the people who once loved me, and I them, their long shadows cast by a low morning sun.





TWO


There wasn’t anything in my past to suggest that I was the type of woman who would fall in love with a man like Max Winter, not in the course of a year, let alone in just under a month, but fall in love I did—an incredible thing to happen to someone like me. I say this not to be modest or self-deprecating, but I truly was unremarkable. In the books that I grew up reading and in the movies I loved to watch, the young women who had had these whirlwind affairs were beautiful or had something odd about them that upended their perfection, making them more beautiful for it. A gap in their front teeth, perhaps, or strangely set eyes, fun and dangerous women in whose wake men collapsed like felled trees. Or they were entirely oblivious to their beauty, women who came into themselves after a powerful man bestowed upon them the financial security or sexual satisfaction that had so far eluded them. Though you might have mistaken me for this type of woman, I was not that either. I was and am still unremarkable. My features are even, my body trim, hair, eyes, and skin compatible with each other in ways that make sense. Even my character, self-sufficient and serious-minded, watchful and earnest, doesn’t draw attention to itself. Men do not clamor after me. And before Max I had never been jealous of women like that. They made the men in those scenarios seem ridiculous. I’d watch them at the club’s poolside bar with their sunburned scalps, their cigar smoke and signet rings, their sunglasses barely camouflaging the direction of their gazes. They looked and behaved like toddlers in a grocery store, dazzled by abundance. Meanwhile, the wives of these rich men, watching their men watch other young women, vibrated with the nervous energy of animals that sensed a looming natural disaster. So when I was swept off my feet, as they say, by an older wealthy American who made me feel as though I’d never need to eat again, I thought, after initial reluctance, that I might as well surrender to the lark, as long as I knew not to get used to it.

I had wanted what my parents had had, a calm and private union, unknowable to others. My parents were disillusioned Americans who chose to live and work on a small fishing trawler where there was no separation of tasks, just days spent quietly and diligently in each other’s company, taking turns tending to me. I was born on that boat in choppy water, and by luck of both latitude and longitude I was given American papers, too, mailed to us, since my parents never wanted to return to the States. My fiercest memory is of my mother bobbing me on her hip in shallow water, teaching me to swim. The feel of my mother’s wet skin against mine formed a deep sense memory, often triggered when I’d see other mothers holding their babies on the beaches of Grand Cayman, where we moved when it was time for me to go to school. They chose it because it was quiet and small and under no threat of political tumult, its poverty, of which we were a part, mostly hidden amidst the prettily painted homes outside George Town. From kindergarten to the twelfth grade, I attended a strict Christian grammar school in George Town, cooled by straw fans and shuttered windows, where we were taught, British-style, by rote and a smack on the hand with a ruler.

When I was six my mother died of cancer. She wasn’t sick for long, maybe three months, my father often skipping a day on the water to go to the hospital and hold her hand. I’d meet them there after school. If her pain was manageable, I could see her. Other times I’d have to wait in a small gray room down the hall that became, to me, the physical manifestation of sadness.

Not long after she died, arthritis set into my father’s wrists, making it impossible for him to pull heavy nets. He didn’t complain. He wrapped his wrists in tape and took a job at a local charter company ferrying rich people out on fishing excursions. He loved the work, but struggled to take orders from his boss, an imperious Australian named Laureen Ennis, one of the richest women in the Caribbean. She was entirely self-made, someone who should have been a role model to me, were her character not so repulsive, her manner so coarse. Stranger still, despite her considerable wealth, she spent almost no money to look rich. Her nails were chipped and dirty, her clothes rotating sets of stretched-out gym wear. She went too long between dye jobs so often sported inches of white roots. But it was her voice that was the most grating, so loud you couldn’t tell if she or the recipient of her braying lecture was going deaf. At supper, my father occasionally mimicked her, his deep voice lending it a guttural roughness that made me laugh.