Homesick for Another World(44)
“Gaaah,” John said. He handed her the cash, then grunted. The girl waved good-bye cheerfully. If Marcia could see him now, acting like some kind of Frankenstein, she’d laugh, John thought.
He pulled the photos from their sleeve and shuffled through them on the way home. There were half a dozen shots of ocean waves, the horizon, and several street scenes, each interrupted by the splatter of bird shit on the car window through which they’d been taken. Nothing looked as beautiful as it had in real life. The people, the buildings, the beach—it was all flat and dull, despite the glossy finish of the photo paper. There was a close-up of cocktails served in coconuts and decorated with toothpick-speared chunks of pineapple and orange slices and Maraschino cherries, colorful paper umbrellas, curlicue straws. On either side of the frame were the brown, deeply lined hands of the server holding the raffia tray. There was a shot of Marcia’s ankles, her feet plunged deep into the pale-gray sand. It had been gritty, soft, dry volcanic ash, like what was left of Marcia in the urn in the kitchen, John supposed. There were a few photos of the pool snapped from the balcony of their hotel room, a blurry shot of John on his cell phone in the lobby, one of John shaking hands with a tiny monkey in the forest, John shaking hands with the nature guide, John eating a platter of crabs. There was only one photo of Marcia, a self-portrait taken in the reflection of the vanity mirror in the hotel bathroom. She smiled coquettishly in her berry-colored lipstick, her face a floating mask above the white orb of the flash.
The final photo in the set seemed to be an extra, a half exposure at the end of the roll. The right side of the picture was gray, empty. A red line went down the center like a burn mark. The left side showed the grainy landscape of the beach at night, and, in the bottom corner, the top half of a face. It belonged to a local, a native. A beach boy, John presumed, one of those male prostitutes. The dark skin appeared almost black in the dimness of the picture. Only the whites of the eyes glistened, almost yellow, like hanging lanterns. Marcia had taken the photo by accident, John supposed. But when had she come so close to a beach boy? She’d made such a fuss about keeping her distance. During that first walk, when the beach boys had followed them, Marcia had hurried back to the hotel grounds and insisted vehemently that John look away. “If you make eye contact, it’s like an invitation,” she’d said.
“To what?” John had asked.
“To a party you wouldn’t like,” she’d answered, “and that you’d have to pay for.”
“Would you like it?” he’d asked. He’d been joking, of course. Marcia had said nothing.
“Hello, nice people? Hello?”
At home, John found Marcia’s magnifying glass in her bedside drawer. He sat down, turned on the lamp, and held the magnifying glass over the beach boy’s eyes, hoping he might find some kind of explanation reflected in them. Had Marcia been unfaithful? Had she been pretending, as long as John had known her, to be a prude? He craned his neck and brought his own eye closer and closer to the photo, squinting, straining every muscle until he found something he took to be a sign, an invitation—a single red pixel in the darkness of the boy’s right pupil.
Back on the island, John stood once again in the hotel lobby. The overnight flight had been bumpy. He hadn’t slept at all. The radio in the hotel shuttle from the airport had warned of hurricane-force gales, possible flooding, thunder, lightning. A murky bank of clouds crept slowly but steadily across the sky.
“Will we have to evacuate?” John asked.
The desk attendant rubbed her eyes. “Maybe, sir. They don’t tell us anything.” She slid John’s room key across the counter. Behind the check-in desk, the clerks were talking and yawning and sharing small cookies from a grease-soaked paper bag. John remembered the cookies from a tour of the market on the other side of the island. The guide had explained to him and Marcia that the cookies were made not from flour but from some native root vegetable, molasses, and butter that came from goat’s milk. A sack of twenty cookies cost less than a dollar.
“Can you imagine?” Marcia had whispered.
John had hoped that the guide would arrange for them to try some, but they’d simply idled by the vendor’s cart, Marcia covering her mouth and nose with a tissue, while the guide chatted with a passerby in the local patois. Rife, John recalled now. The sights and sounds and smells of the market came back to him. There were bowls of spices and beans of every hue, hot goat’s milk poured from dirty metal teapots atop charcoal briquettes into small plastic cups like the ones John used at the dentist’s to rinse and spit. Hot smoke from cauldrons of roasting meat roiled across baskets of nuts and fruits, stacks of woven shawls that the women used as slings to carry their babies on their backs, pyramids of pastel-colored toilet-paper rolls. In a dark corner of the market, they’d passed an old man, his eyes sky blue with cataracts. He sat behind a table full of empty Coke bottles and tin cans. Beside him was a rickety chest of drawers. When John asked what the man was selling, the guide answered “spiritual medicine,” twirled his finger in the air, and widened his eyes, as though to make fun of the crazy old man. “People in the villages believe in that nonsense,” the guide said. “They believe in magic. Evil.” He crossed himself and laughed, then yelled at a young girl who had splashed dirty water on his shoes while rolling her bike through a puddle on the path. One of Marcia’s photos had been of that market. The royal-blue plastic tarps covering the stalls appeared nearly black, like funeral shrouds. Recalling that image now gave John the chills. He’d told everyone back home that he was going to the island to scatter Marcia’s ashes. That was the excuse he gave.