All the Finest Girls (23 page)

Only my face is above the water’s surface, and the sun dries the salt till my cheek feels hot and tight. A voice is carried to my ear along the surface of the water, and when I sense the too-close rumble of a boat’s motor, I open my eyes. A teenage boy and girl are looking over the port side of their Boston Whaler at me.

“You OK, kid?” asks the boy, leaning over so I can see the letter
B
on his Red Sox cap.

I nod and smile, touching with my hand a tender spot on my shoulder. I’ve drifted across the cove and through the glittering sun can just make out Edith and my mother on the deck of our boat. Edith has one hand on her hip and the other on my mother’s shoulder.

“Shit, Dale,” says the girl, peering over the top of her sunglasses, “look at her shoulders!”

“Jellyfish,” says Dale, looking at me with his mouth open.

I slowly swim the breaststroke back to Edith’s boat and climb up on the running board. Out of the cold water, the stings heat up and catch fire, accelerated by the heat of the sun. My teeth begin to chatter, and when Mom bends down and puts her hands on me, her lips apart but wordless, I cannot stop myself from falling into her arms.

22

I
HAD A THING
or two to tell Errol and though I wasn’t exactly sure what those things were, I was in a big rush all of a sudden to say them. By the time I reached Foxy’s Palace, I’d worked myself into a pretty good lather. Stoked with anger and propelled by my new mania, I determined a hazy course of action that got me as far as the tall, cambered front door. The now familiar voice I believed to be Lou’s urged me on. The rest I left to fate, praying that my plan would reveal itself when I met my destination.

I spent a disorienting ten minutes wandering through a broad antechamber that served as the entranceway to Foxy’s restaurant and beachfront. The hall had a schizophrenic personality I found both spooky and depressing. Lit by chandeliers hung from mahogany rafters, the Moorish room was a monument to colonial domination, and thick with shadows. I could almost see the liveried servants standing in their alcoves, hear the rustle of long skirts across the heavy terra-cotta. The plastered walls had turned dun, cleaved and blistered with years of neglect. But like an old drunk in a party hat, Foxy’s entryway had been halfheartedly improved with already outmoded nightclub décor. A neon Ladies sign swung, broken, from over an imposing door; one-armed bandits stood about looking like handicapped and abandoned children. If not for the smell of new paint, which drew me around a curve, I might have thought Foxy’s was out of business.

The man I found up on a ladder was working his way back from the farthest end of the hallway. A fresh white coat of primer glistened over old water spots. As I approached, he was laboriously scraping the trim off a sign — Gentlemen Will Kindly Wear Neckties and Jackets — that hailed from a lost era.

“Is the proprietor around?” I asked the painter, who seemed to enjoy the interruption and slowly got down from his perch to answer me.

“Yah mean de boss?”

“Yes,” I replied, impatient.

He considered my question as he wiped his hands with great deliberation on a rag hanging from his waistband.

“De boss is on de beach.”

Finally, after a bit of coaxing, he directed me out a side door, where a staircase led me away from that museum of history and all its decrepitude. Charging onward, I caught sight of my shadow on the building wall. It looked like a launched cruise missile.

The beach was blazing. A handful of umbrellas tilted about, making tiny pools of shade for a dozen people sane enough to seek them. But largely what I found below was a long, uneven line of sun-blasted beach chairs filled almost to capacity with tourists slicked up and roasting. Near the chaises lay identical white bags emblazoned with the cruise ship’s logo: a cartoon dolphin wearing an exaggerated grin, leaping through a bejeweled crown. No one looked to be in charge, and so, setting my eye on the beach’s other end, I began to make my sun-drunk way along the strand.

Had he flattered her that she still looked the way she had when they were young? Told her all the mistakes he’d made along the way, how age and sorrow had changed him? What had made her say yes now? Was it the lure of a promise unfulfilled that had taken her down to the beach that night? Or had he urged her to return to him for old times’ sake and nothing more? No clever entreaties, no snap and patter. Either way, I’d decided I was going to take hold of the dinner jacket lapels I imagined Errol in and hurl him headlong into the surf. Quite suddenly, I had a mission.

“Hey lady! Watch it!” barked a man into whose chair I rammed. Catching my foot on the stubby metal leg, I pitched forward nearly on top of his enormous belly.

“How could I miss it,” I spat back. Righting myself in a huff, I continued down the corridor of flesh. A girl in a bikini riding a Jet Ski made a sharp turn just before hitting the shore and splattered me with a cooling spume of seawater. I stopped to wipe my face and catch my breath. A few chairs away, a young couple was placing an order with a man who had his back to me. He wore a white coat, short pants, and kneesocks, and carried a spotless silver tray.

A rum and tonic — no, just give me a Coke. You got Coke? How about you make it a rum and Coke? Good rum — don’t gyp me arright? Whoa, hold on, boy. Babe, what are you having? You got piña coladas? Are they good here? She likes ’em sweet. OK, good, we’ll take that and

The man on the chaise was bird chested but alarmingly tan, the color of liver. A turquoise bathing suit stretched taut over his lumpen assets. All the time he spoke with the waiter, he slowly caressed his own broad rug of chest hair, lovingly tracing each glistening whorl. His girlfriend, nearly matching him in skin tone, kept her face to the sun, eyes invisible behind her large gold-rimmed glasses. She yawned and spritzed herself from a bottle of oil while deciding what to have. The man continued talking and touching himself.

Lemme get some kind of sandwich. Real simple. You got something doesn’t have any of that fruity shit you people put on your food? Can you make me a sub? You know what a submarine is?

I waited till he finished his order, then reached for the white-jacketed shoulder of the man whose boss I sought. For a moment or two time unhanded us. The tiger eyes that met mine flickered, unblinking, and in their seamless reflection I could see my mouth in an ovoid of shock. Derek’s face glittered with sweat, his jaw hard as granite. He gave me his back again, after which I stumbled along while he charged through the maze of beach chairs.

Derek was up the stone staircase and well across Foxy’s bal-ustraded terrace before he yielded to my entreaties, turned, and practically slammed into me.

“What is your problem?” he said in measured, combustible tones.

“My problem?” I shrieked, my voice curdled by embarrassment and rage. “
I
don’t have a problem.”

Derek began to walk away, but I pulled him back and forced him to face me. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I hadn’t fought with anyone since I was a kid, had always gone to enormous lengths to avoid a confrontation. My hand clutched Derek’s arm, and I could feel my whole body shaking. But now that I had his attention, I wasn’t sure I could say any more. Derek, for better or worse, didn’t give me much of a chance.

“What do yah think you’re doing here, anyway?” he said, pushing my hand off his sleeve as if he’d been splattered with crap. “Just why in de blazing hell are yah here?”

“I came down with Marva,” I said, thrusting a finger in the direction of the market.

“No. Here on St. Clair. At my mumma’s funeral. Why did yah come?”

Beads of perspiration dripped into Derek’s eyes. He squinted them away.

“Because I thought it might help,” I sputtered. I felt as if I were being dangled by my ankles out a window, searching for a line with which to save myself.

Derek pursed his lips and turned away again. In my head, my voice was a roar. But what came out when I spoke was closer to a plaintive sort of murmur.

“Why do you hate me so much?”

At this, Derek wheeled around, unable to contain himself anymore.

“I don’t hate yah,” he said, his voice calm but pregnant with rage. “I do not hate you. Me don’t
give
a shit about yah.” He turned away, then turned back again. “Me gwana tell yah someting, OK? Yah tink yah were special. Me know. Like she loved yah and oh, ain’t it sweet how yah loved her so much. Yah black mother. Yah. Yah proud of yahself, right? Treated her just like one of yah own, after she gwan and wipe yah uptight white ass for a couple of years.”

“No, Derek,” I protested, hopelessly.

“Wait. Now yah come down here and doing us all a big favor in our time of grief. Well, listen. Thanks, but we not interested.”

“Derek —”

“No. Let me
instruct
you.” He narrowed his eyes at me and tapped his temple. “So yah stop misunderstanding yahself, all right? I understand yah and
here’s
de real shit. Get dis. Yah
nevah
stopped tinking of her as beneath yah. Nevah stopped looking down on her. Right? Maybe yah feel a lickle sorry for her, like she’s a puppy or some such, because she’s black. Maybe it made yah love her
more,
even. But de shit of it is yah
nevah
once looked at her witout tinking, ‘She’s black and me whiter dan white.’ Did yah?”

A memory washed in like bilge, crowding my vision.

“Yah tink she woulda wanted yah here? She wouldna given a shit. Don’t yah get it?” Derek poked the air with an emphatic, trembling finger. “She was paid to be caring for yah!”

“So what?!” I shouted, feeling myself unraveling. “I still loved her. Regardless of what you think of my love, Derek. Of the
quality
of my love! Or the, whatever,
color
of it!”

“Den where yah been?” he shouted back, bringing his face up close to mine. “All dese years. Hmm? When she was sick, crying from pain like a baby. When she gwan fucking crazy, not knowing who she was. Hmm? Dis ain’t about she, yah coming down here. It’s about
you
. If yah loved her so much, where were yah? Tell me, do yah
evah
tink about anyone but yahself?!” Derek laughed. “Yah must tink yah de only person in de goddamn world. Yah sure as hell ain’t doing her much good now she’s dead.” He took a breath and began at last to back away. “And tell Philip to do his own work. Not to send yah down here like some goodwill goddamn ambassador.”

“Philip didn’t tell me to come here,” I said, my voice now no more than a strangulated whisper.

He held up a hand.

“Yah know what? Me don’t care.”

With that, Derek turned on his heels and, dropping the metal tray with a bang, walked back down the beach. A couple of birds alit on the railing, their heads cocking this way and that. They chirped and flitted away, their song punctuating the relentlessly cheerful island music that wafted from somewhere inside.

I saw my mother in a movie once, playing the girlfriend of a desperado. It was a forgettable picture for the most part, a racy western with a lot of violence intercut with endless scenes of ribald saloon merriment, conquest, and seduction, followed by more gunplay and galloping into the sunset. My mother’s character doesn’t show up till well into the second act. She’s the prostitute who eventually wins the heart of the handsome gang leader, only to watch him be killed in a border skirmish with a bunch of banditos. As always, Mom looked beautiful but lost. No amount of acting could hide what she was: a Smith girl on a Hollywood back lot, trying more gamely to keep her dignity with every layer of satin and lace she shed. It was pitiful, really, but there was one scene I’ve never forgotten.

Kit, the outlaw, and Lily, the harlot, have made love for what will turn out to be the last time. Lily lies on the bed while Kit pulls on his boots and holsters his gun with elaborate gravity. She can see her own reflection in the mirror on the wall. Kit knows he’s not going to make it out of this fight alive and as he dresses he tells Lily/Mom how much he cares for her. All the while, my mother is looking not at Kit but at her own face, running her finger gently along her throat. Mom was wearing a lot of stage makeup, but I knew that beneath the place she touched was a birthmark the size of a small eggplant. It was claret colored and spilled from the side of her neck to a spot just above her clavicle. She always hated that spot, said it reminded her of a rodent, or a hairless baby possum. Her birthmark was, as far as I could tell, the only physical flaw she had, and I never saw her leave home without concealing it.

In the scene I remember, Kit tells her there are other cowboys on the range, that she’ll meet someone new and forget about him, throws her a few manly clichés. Lily/Mom’s eyes are a hundred miles away. For her, he’s already gone. She seems to be seeing herself years into the future, alone. Or perhaps that’s just what I imagined. Anyway, in the end Kit leans in to kiss her good-bye. Lily, a prostitute again, won’t give him her mouth. Instead, in an acting choice only Mom could have made, she presses the actor’s mouth to her neck so that he’ll kiss her birthmark. As he does, she keeps her gaze on the mirror and tears roll down her face. It was an incredibly honest moment and it moved me so that I wept. I’d never told her I saw the picture and that I knew what was going on in that scene.

As I followed Derek down the sandy strand, the gap between us rapidly widening, I thought of that movie. Just past Foxy’s, where the beach was empty, I gave up my pursuit and stopped near the high-tide line. Maybe I was crazy, I mused, but didn’t Derek look a little like the actor who played Kit? I could never remember his name. R something, Ray, Ron.

A biplane made a slow arc around the harbor, pulling a banner advertising new waterfront condominiums. The old motor racketed above as I began to clear a patch of hot sand around me. With my fingers I plowed even furrows, concentrating, to the exclusion of all other thought, on the trueness of each row until, finally, I had a precise rectangle the length of my body. I sat down carefully in the center and turned my sights on the sparkling water. Lou appeared there, in a vision that had, I suspect, been forming for days in my head. Walking into the sea, back to me, her dress fanning out about her like a lily pad. I would have followed, but the earth’s pull rooted me to the spot.