Attachment (10 page)

S
he was looking
for her car keys and called out to check on how ready Phyllis was. Totally ready; it was Jean who was searching for her sunglasses now, and where was the good map? These two weeks felt like a month. Time to go to the airport.

To her amazement, her mother seemed to count the visit a perfect success and in the car was brimming with praise for all things Jean—her house, her island, even her
hair.
As Phyllis herself might say, Who’d a thunk it? They tooled along the red road, ticking off the highlights: the botanical garden for sure, the Baie des Anges, but best of all, the Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center, where Jean had made a date to go back and interview the director, Bruce McGhee, about his plans to release all the kestrels into the wild. She’d never forget feeding that runty bird—what was his name, Bud?—and was determined to write about it, but not for Mackay.
Mrs
readers wouldn’t take an interest in extinction unless it was unfolding on Exmoor.

She’d held out a dead white mouse on her flattened palm, like an apple offered to a horse. And as with her first up-close pony at age six, she’d been nervous, had wanted to toss or at least
dangle
the bait. A tail, a stem—who’s to say that’s not
what they’re for? The horse with his smoker’s teeth had rewarded her stillness with a gummy tickle that had given her a first idea of what kissing a boy might be like. And here, forty years on, with the same palm outstretched as if for fortunetelling, she’d again stood still. The bird swooped: the brown wings, speckled white body and bright black eye, and a ripple of air no greater than from a baby yawning—then the almost imperceptible caress of talons on her hand as the kestrel took the mouse, bore it off, lifting up and out of sight.

While Phyllis looked out the car window, committing the island to memory, Jean imagined how she’d soon hug her and then wave at her in the window of the small plane, how she’d stand on the runway still waving as the wind of the propeller flattened and then raised and then flattened her hair, giving the lie, and comically, to Phyllis’s praise. When the little plane was finally out of sight Jean would walk, no, she would stride over to the rental car, the late sun on her shoulders, and treat herself by not returning it today, or even tomorrow. On the way home her spirits instead of sinking would continue to rise.

In the event, it wasn’t quite like this. Driving back, she saw the women’s clinic ahead and remembered that she’d never picked up her mammogram results. Surely they’d have called her if there was anything wrong, but it was too infantile not to go in and collect them. As she crossed the waiting room, jangling her keys to dispel the silence, the formerly cool nurse rose and came around from behind the reception desk to greet her. It seemed they’d been trying to contact her—hadn’t she gotten the letter? Jean registered a brief surge of nausea.

Handing over the wobbly manila envelope containing her X-rays, the nurse explained that the mammogram was unsatisfactory—or did she mean inconclusive? They recommended
une échographie.
Jean had difficulty taking in this information and not only because of her French. I’m being handled, she thought. Smiling pastoral care. They know something they’re not telling me. Though she wasn’t quite clear what an
échographie
was, like a docile heifer to the slaughterhouse she booked an appointment, and left.

Jean wasn’t entirely surprised—why else hadn’t she stopped in for her results? And she could now admit to herself the conviction she’d suppressed, that there
was
something there, on her right side. Not a lump, exactly, but a change in texture, as if deep therein lodged a scrap of…cheap mattress foam. Back on the ring road, she wondered if by her inaction she’d already decided this was a stray shred of foam, a lost bit of packing peanut that she could live with, or around. Maybe it would dissolve with exercise, or worry. Or grief.

Jean’s hands ached from her grip on the steering wheel. Dread settled in her stomach like a brick that no army of enzymes could dent, going at it with their worst acids, every digestive pickax and drill. And it told her she was, apparently, being evicted. Not from the house, or even from her marriage, but from the island.

The harsh light hurt her eyes, and sunglasses only seemed to introduce a burning contrast at the edges. Every bloom looked garish: the orange flamboya tree, the purple jacaranda, the fuchsia bougainvillea, red-orifice hibiscus, the gardenia stink bomb, the obscene anthurium. Even her favorite, the pale blue plumbago, seemed to overreach itself, crawling in everywhere it wasn’t wanted. She pined for a plain pot of hardy geraniums, suburban blue hydrangea, a tidy vase of odorless tulips. Instead, all around her, the full, indifferent jungle pressed in. Everything smelled either putrid or chokingly sweet.

She may as well turn right around and motor straight back to the airport, she thought, because all of a sudden she couldn’t stop things from looking ugly—like the garbage all along the road. And as she knew from her walks with Phyllis, the more
beautiful the place, the more trash people tossed there. The Black River Gorges had great heaps of it, specially carted in. She’d taken Phyllis down the trail, and soon she’d been pointing up at fictional birds, anything to distract her mother not only from the garbage, but from the carpet of used condoms covering the path like confetti on a church walk.

Jean swerved to avoid hitting a dog. Death-wish dogs near death already, they littered the island. It was a common sight, the mutt hit and then left on the road to die, rolled out like cookie dough as drivers flattened it in two directions, until it wore away altogether. Nobody valued anything here. Families tramped out into the woods and chopped down a tree for firewood—so that the big rains that came every year brought floods and mud slides, every year. Images of whole settlements whisked off their toothpick moorings occasionally caught the attention of a foreign television crew or a foreign aid agency, but nobody planted more trees.

She passed through a cluster of food stands and patchwork shacks. If St. Jacques was rejecting her, she thought—experimentally, defensively—she’d do the same. Look at these people, just sitting on the curb scratching their heads and pulling on their earlobes, dumbly turning to watch her drive past, people with luck so bad it must be deserved. But it didn’t work. Jean was miserable; she thought all she could ever want was to be allowed to stay on as before, unsingled-out.

How could she forgive Mark
this,
the unfixable lost love affair with paradise itself, her island no longer a haven and a home but a quarantine—hadn’t it actually been a leper colony at one time?—and so far from
home
home, far from Victoria, and her own doctor. Mark had so comprehensively uprooted their lives, with Jean idiotically following—never mind the broken connection she was experiencing now, loosened but not severed, no luxury of drama here, no mud slide, no television crew; just a regular, entirely foreseeable mistake. But going back and undoing the damage, this wasn’t going to be a simple detour with a clear price, like returning the rental car a week late.

Forty minutes of fast driving and Jean came to the market spread across a large clearing by the road. On an impulse she pulled over, just for a moment. She stepped out of the car and breathed deeply, surveying the scene: swarms of shoppers and vendors, with their fortifications of rolled rugs and tilted coffers of ground spices, pulverized remedies for everything from
echauffage,
overheating, to “oppression.” Women steamed stuffed leaves, their gums bloodred from betel nut; boys pushed cartfuls of sliced jelly and blue coconut cakes; men roasted entrails over low fires in the middle of the street. Jean knew why she was drawn to this riot of sensations—for the bodies other than her own.

Beside her stood the only covered section of the market, on stilts, above this teeming life. And it was teeming death. Whole animals swung from iron hooks in the meat market, thick with sensuality and rot. Every corner of this longhouse had an entrance, at the top of a rickety wooden staircase, each door marked by a sign for illiterates that showed a single painted image: goat, cow, fish, fowl. So, she thought, utterly desolate, here, as everywhere, you had to follow the correct flow—go out of the building and down the steps and then up again to reenter by the proper door if it was some other creature you were after. Before you could begin, you had to know how you’d end. You had to know what you wanted. Head-down buying: humorlessly pointing,
bargaining.
This was a tug-of-war—the very thing she couldn’t bring herself to do.

That’s what was wrong with her, she realized—apart, of course, from her riddled corpus. There beside the longhouse it struck her, trying not to inhale the stench of rotting flesh. It
wasn’t just her own decay. Or her shyness. It was not knowing what she wanted. Wanting not to know: this, it turned out, was not enough. You couldn’t treat a disease, you couldn’t make someone love you, you couldn’t get around the Internet and its infinity of filth, you couldn’t be useful to your child, you couldn’t even buy dinner, not without knowing what you wanted. What happened to feeling your way? What happened to things just as they were, to not going to the gym and
not
rearranging the furniture, which had worked for everyone’s ancestors for centuries, until now? This was all gone.

She hurried back to the car, pursued by an old woman selling prawns from a bucket. Just to get rid of her, Jean bought the lot, and back on the road she thought once more, This is what’s wrong with you—and what, she guessed, was right with Giovana. The clarity of purpose. She wondered how much time she had left. She’d read about it—she’d even written about it—how suddenly it could strike you, a matter of weeks. Forget the
échographie,
whatever the hell stopgap measure that was. She was desperate to get rid of her breasts, not that she expected excision or mastectomy to work. You could chop down the tree, but the roots remained below, with their everextending reach; a destiny courtesy of the St. Jacques Ministry of Health—the antique X-ray and the inexperienced eye—as you had only to expect on an outpost island in an outpost ocean.

Three months: she couldn’t bear to think what kind of difference to her life span it might have made if she’d collected her results straightaway. There was no more time to waste. She had to become more like her rival, and more like Mark. He, too, had always known what he wanted. He was already specialized when she met him. There he was in Crime and Thriller, while she gazed over the long rows of General Release—Drama, Period, Romantic Comedy.

T
hat night Jean
passed out in the bath and had to be helped to bed, wrapped by Mark in the shroud of his blue robe. When she woke, twelve hours later, he was standing beside her holding a mug of milky tea.

“Tragic nap?” he asked sweetly (in his habits of speech Mark enjoyed compression even more than exaggeration: the twelve-hour “nap”). She could only nod assent and obediently sip, nursing the cup in two hands, and when he left her to go back to work, she looked down at her partially exposed breasts—still there, showing nothing…they were all such good little liars now. Farther down, she saw that her body was imprinted with a diamond pattern from the waffle weave of the fabric, like a fishnet catsuit.

In the bathroom, Jean judged that sleep, or dehydration, was working in her favor: she looked firmer than she would later in the day, as if she’d spent the night in a big woman-shaped Jell-O mold and her form had settled and temporarily solidified. Gravity would bag it out again and, hours later, the fishnet would still be there, but it would hold nothing in. No more holding in and no more springing back. And even as she had this thought—just the kind of cold-eyed, womanly observation that made her the mass-read health writer she was—she
realized it, too, would have to be revised, through the prism of gratitude that was contingent on major illness.

Mark, belted into what he called his dressy dressing gown of patterned vintage rayon—a gift from Victoria—had spent the entire morning in the small study, working on the campaign for that line of nostalgic appliances: rotund ovens and fridges. He was stumped. In St. Jacques
all
appliances looked like this, but they were painstakingly maintained antiques, not winking retro. Sitting with coffee, Jean watched him go in and out of the fridge three times for beer, and it wasn’t yet lunchtime.

“What are you doing now?” she asked, as if she couldn’t see. Dan would be calling to go over the pitch in less than an hour.

“Making a proper drink,” he said, defiant. “Dark rum, a splash of our favored cane, a squeeze of lime, a spriglet of mint, and two heaping tablespoons of vanilla sugar—nectar of the gods.”

But Jean could see he was distracted by a bigger worry—and she hadn’t even told him about the clinic. For the first time she thought it entirely possible Giovana would dump him first. Or maybe it was that he couldn’t work here. Advertising was about tuning in to local mood, trends, perversions, aspirations, even weather. In fact mainly weather. People shopped to make up for weather. Of course it didn’t matter what kind of fridge you had in St. Jacques, so long as it got cold enough. (So, here too, it was about weather.) He couldn’t connect at a distance; he couldn’t
care
enough about the shape of a refrigerator. That’s what Jean saw in the upped booze consumption, Mark trying to give a shit, with consequences. His deadlines always triggered an increase. Because he didn’t acknowledge stress, thinking it newfangled and possibly American, he convinced himself that pressure stirred his creative juices. But increasingly, his elaborate cocktails
were
his creative juices.

How long could they last if he couldn’t work? Jean was also having problems with her column. She couldn’t write about betel nut, the local stimulant and digestive aid, because it wasn’t yet available in Tesco or CVS. But what kind of health story
could
she do while she was facing down cancer? She really didn’t want to write about that—like those obituaries filed years in advance. And she didn’t want to talk to him about it before she decided what to do. Maybe
neither
of them could work here, she thought, spinning lettuce at the sink, spinning, spinning, spinning. Oh my God, there he was again, back in that fridge, still muttering about “these fat fucking fridges.”

Jean didn’t respond, just kept about her task, assembling lunch, and through the window, she spotted Christian chugging along the track. Well, at least she’d already had the horrible news from the clinic—what other surprises might he have in his bag of tricks? She followed his progress, his bob and his weave, climbing toward the house. Up here at her high command station by the kitchen window she felt like a lighthouse keeper. Jean plunged the prawns into the boiling water and watched as they turned, almost instantly, from gray to pink. That must be what it’s like, she thought. Having an affair.

She was prepared to meet Christian, but Mark—clearly desperate for any interruption—beat her to it. A few minutes later he wandered back inside carrying a couple of small parcels, a large envelope—probably from the clinic. Over his head he was waving a letter. “From Vic,” he said, depositing the packages on the shelf, out of the way of her lunch making. She glanced up at the first one. The minuscule handwriting was vaguely familiar but not readily identifiable. Mark frisked himself for his glasses; Jean peeled the prawns and waited. She might not tell him about the clinic at all, she thought. What perspicacity and foresight he showed, having someone lined up to comfort him and, one fine day in the not-too-distant future,
to replace her. Before he got the letter out of the envelope, the phone rang.

“Shit. Dan!? Hi. Theo, that you? Connie? Is Connie on? Hang on a mo’.” He covered the mouthpiece and said to Jean, “Don’t wait for me. This’ll take about half an hour. Unless we get cut off.”

He took his beer from the counter and disappeared with the cordless phone, and the letter, into his study. Now Jean had to wait to hear Vic’s news. She stood at the sink, eating a giant prawn, and thought that would be one good thing about living on her own: no more
meals.
When she took down the two packages, her equanimity, such as it was, vanished. The small handwriting would have to wait; she
knew
who’d sent the second one and it made her scalp itch. A book bag that didn’t have a book in it, addressed to Mark. She studied the big block capitals, slanted backward—Giovana’s unschooled hand. London postmark, no return address.

A natural nosiness in Jean had, over these stealthy months, hardened into skill, and in a glance she saw that the packet had not been taped or glued, just stapled: these could easily be reinserted. Holding it out of sight in the depths of the sink, she unpicked the light aluminum staples and placed them in a saucer on the shelf, then she reached into the bag and pulled out something hard and bubble-wrapped.

She removed the plastic and looked at the naked item that rolled into her palm, mystified. Hard purple rubber, it could be some sort of pacifier, or designer kitchen utensil. A bottle stopper, or maybe something for mixing cocktails? No doubt Mark and Giovana enjoyed their cocktails. But this was more like a teething ring, the kind you put in the freezer first. She held it up to the light to look for markings. Well, there was a ring, but too small for even a baby’s hand. And protruding from one end was a thick, flattish tab, made of the same molded rubber but ribbed. An instrument of torture? Jean looked again in the bag and saw a folded sheet of instructions:
Fig. 1, pull ring down onto erect penis.
It wasn’t a pacifier; it was a stimulator, for Giovana’s pleasure. No, for
Jean’s
pleasure. Why else had she sent it here? Just showing off, pushing the limits, as everybody knew you could with a man in thrall. A souvenir, like those underpants with the road signs? Was it
used
? She had the gizmo rewrapped and restapled and back on the shelf in under a minute. It took her longer to wash her hands, scrubbing and staring blindly through the window. When she was finished, she took the package down off the shelf and tossed it in the garbage under the sink.

She washed her hands again, still staring out the open window. Jean saw a bird of traffic-cone orange, sitting on the fence that marked the edge of the property. He was one of her regulars, and she called him Highlighter, for his fluorescent feathers. Poor creature, camouflaged nowhere, except in the bird book where she’d been unable to find a likeness. She leaned forward, holding some crumbs out through the window, urging him closer, trying to forget what she’d seen.

Jean hadn’t heard Mark leave the house, but there he was now, walking toward the road. She put on her glasses for detailed viewing and saw that as he walked he held his dressing gown together with his hands, letting the belt trail behind in the dust. He’d gone to close the gate. She knew it annoyed him that Christian left it open, and that it was Christian himself who grated. She watched as he struggled to hook the wire loop over the post with one hand, still holding his robe closed. She couldn’t help smiling as he tried to hold the robe closed with his elbow, to free up the other hand, now using
both
elbows. The wind had come up and lifted his hair, probably pulling at his dressing
gown, too. He must be swearing his head off, she thought as he stepped back but held his robe tightly closed with his arms crossed, waiting and watching for the gate to spring open by itself, which it sometimes did. Just, he believed, to thwart him.

When Mark returned, his belt tied not in a bow but in a double knot, Jean was already sitting outside, sipping coffee. A pot on the table, a cup for him.

“We got cut off,” he said. “I’m going to have to go down to the St. Jerome in an hour.”

“Can we have Vic’s letter first?”

“I was just coming to that,” he said, pulling the envelope from his robe pocket and rummaging in the other for his rimless reading glasses. (“So much easier to lose,” he’d said, “designed especially, to get it over with.”) He sat down and read aloud.
“Dear Mum and Dad.”
Mark immediately interrupted himself. “Thank
God
we’re Mum and Dad again—I really loathed that Jean and Mark business. She probably read somewhere it makes your parents respect you more, never mind how you behave…”

“Read!” said Jean.

“Dear Mum and Dad, everything here is copacetic, bodacious, and superfabulicious! Usual appalling weather not that you care! Finished my essay on Engels, the gloomy bahst.
I do love that Vic has given the short for
bastard
a proper permanent spelling, don’t you? Specially conceived to avoid an American pronunciation, you’ll note. Now where was I?
Did you know he used to live in Primrose Hill—little known facts about gloomy bahsts. I’ve begun in on Max Weber. Durkheim and his anomie were good but…
Hmm, let’s see.”

“Don’t skip!”

“Excellent 21st for Fiona who got at least three iPods…
hint, hint.
I wore my green bead dress and some really good silver shoes I got in the market almost new for £5. I still haven’t got anything for Fi. Have you noticed how hard it is to shop ie spend money for a prezzie after the party?”

Mark paused to exchange a look of pleasure with Jean.
“The do was at Tramps, sad posh club in South Ken for your age crowd
—Oy!—
lots of lovely free drink all laid on by her dad who kept groping girls and saying sad things like ‘You’re as young as the woman you feel!’ Poor Fiona. Yes, I have forwarded all the post to Noleen…Maya broke up with Gavin and has been staying at the house, which has been really good, her staying I mean. Send money ha ha. PS Mum, have you already forgotten how to e-mail?? How’s life in paradise? Ex ex ex, Vic.
Well,” he said, refolding the letter, “she sounds good. Really upbeat.”

“Definitely something new in her tone.”

“Yes, no arrows of guilt, no slings of complaint.”

Jean let this pass. “Can I see it now, please?”

“Hang on. Doesn’t it say, here at the end?” He unfolded the letter again, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and turned it over, looking for whatever it was he’d left out. “She says she met someone.
Remember I went to the Hobsbawm lecture? Well Vikram was there and we met in the queue for the free glass of wine. I hope when you visit you’ll meet him. When are you coming? El oh el. Exclamation mark.
”

“Hey, you didn’t read that. Let me see it.” Jean tried to snatch the letter but he held it tight to his chest. She began to complain, then stopped to watch his face change. She saw him hating the idea of Victoria with a boyfriend. He hadn’t even wanted to convert it to fact by reading it out loud.

“Come on. Let’s wait and see,” she said. “You’ve been wondering all year why she hasn’t got a boyfriend.”

Mark looked troubled, as if he hadn’t heard her. He didn’t reply: he really
did
mind.

Victoria’s letter was unrecognizable, not her usual tally of
private grievances and public complaint (demanding friends, injustices committed against the rate payers of the great borough of Camden), nothing at all, in fact, about her feelings. And then this surprise, tacked-on ending. Jean thought she knew what the change in her was, the source of her new lightness, the awkward chattiness in the letter. She’d had sex.

Jean didn’t imagine Vic was a virgin; in fact she was pretty sure she wasn’t. But anything before this would count as a technicality. And so, to distract Mark, or maybe to give him something worth brooding over, she told him about her stop at the clinic.

“And I have to go back. They want to do another test—
une échographie.
That means something’s wrong.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What else can it mean?”

“They want to be sure. It’s their job; that’s just a sonogram. Maybe things are unclear, that’s all.”

“That’s what I said. Something’s wrong. God, I’m exhausted. I’m going to lie down for an hour.” She brushed past him. Despite her huge sleep the night before, she was suddenly hit by a fatigue of gale force—the final proof, she thought, of her symptoms. She didn’t want comfort, and she’d had enough of comforting
him.

Jean sat on the bed, taking off her earrings—fat silver stars, a present from Vic. She took off her Moroccan silver beads, the only jewelry of hers Victoria coveted, and as she rolled them in her fingers like a rosary she thought about her daughter’s letter. It wasn’t sex. Victoria was in love. Typical of Jean’s mental squalor that she’d fixed on the first—purple teething cock ring, indeed. What would Giovana be sending next? Turquoise butt plugs? Three months ago, I didn’t know what a butt plug
was,
Jean thought, too downcast to renew her fury against Mark. She dropped the necklace onto the night table and put her hands over her breasts and pressed. Then she lay down. And her breasts lay down, too—unleavened, spread, sliding to the edges of the flat earth. Hardly there anyway, she thought, trying not to cry.