Slaves of New York (9 page)

You spend all of Monday searching for the right kind of expensive sun tan oils and lotions; the Bronx Zoo has come out with a line made from cobra and turtle grease. You don't know

why you spend half your life trying to scrub your body free from essential oils and the other half smearing stuff onto it.

You can't wait for the day when humankind is so far evolved that bodies are completely unnecessary and people are nothing but large, flabby gray brains in Plexiglas boxes. Then maybe you'll be appreciated for yourself. As it is, your body has evolved far past the mainstream of society already. You've never been interested in physical exercise. Your highly developed mind inhabits a braincase balanced on top of a large, larval body with feeble, antennalike arms and legs.

The food on the plane trip is not to be believed. Exquisite! Those chefs must have worked hard in the back of the plane: you are served a whitish material resembling chicken, delicately seasoned in a saliva-colored sauce; some unusual pressed vegetable matter shaped like green tubes; and a salad with real lettuce and actual pieces of tomato. This is to be the last fresh food you'll taste for five days.

In order to help your boyfriend calm down—he finds airplane travel extremely erotically stimulating—you feed him your piece of cake, topped with voluptuous sandy frosting. With the coffee comes tiny packets of a white substance, which, when mixed with the coffee, reconstitutes itself into something quite similar to cream. That such food can be served miles above the ground is an amazing feat of modern man: it must be difficult to raise the chickens, lettuce, and so forth so far off the ground.

You are staying on an island about an hour from Port-au-Prince. It's curious how, at the travel agent's, the brochures of Haiti showed an island filled with palm trees and natives with excellent dentures; they must have rented palm trees just to shoot the commercials, because there is no vegetation to be seen on the entire place.

The only thing on the island is the hotel. You are told at once by the hotel clerk not to drink the water or eat any fresh fruits

or vegetables. A surly, superior lackey leads you to your cottage, carrying a thermos of drinkable water. The cottages are A-frame, Swiss chalet type residences; whoever built this hotel saw
Heidi
and
The Sound of Music
one too many times. All the buildings are Swiss chalet type. It is as if Walt Disney had a nervous breakdown and got the plans for Bali H'ai and the Swiss Village at Disney World mixed up.

You go in for a dip and when you come out the surly lackey tells you that dinner this evening will be a barbecue by the swimming pool. You can't take a shower because the water isn't working in your cabin, but you are told this condition is only temporary.

You dress and go to look at the view. A large pink man, whom you've seen earlier, comes and stands directly in front of your picnic table, blocking the way. "You're right, Linda," he says, "I can't see any fire, just smoke."

"What's burning?" your boyfriend says. "Is that a fire in Port-au-Prince?" Across the bay, near the lights of the city, black, crackly-looking clouds of smoke rise into the white, moonlit sky.

"It's not in Port-au-Prince," the man says. "It's much closer, a brush fire."

Your boyfriend strikes up a conversation with the overweight man. His girlfriend, sitting at the other table, is named Linda; she's also somewhat overweight, but it looks as if she has gained weight just to keep her boyfriend company. "We're professional travelers," the man says. He gestures for Linda to come over to your table, where he is standing with his stomach resting along one edge.

"No, we're not, Michael," Linda says.

"Well, what would you call us?"

"We travel," Linda says.

"What do you know about buying paintings in Port-au-Prince?" your boyfriend says.

"They're all alike," Michael says. "Someone manufactures them. What do you want them for?"

"I'm an artist—" your boyfriend begins.

"Me, too," Michael says.

"No, you're not," Linda says. "You're a computer graphics designer."

"And I like to buy these paintings," your boyfriend says. "I put them together and I paint over them."

"Why?" Michael says.

"I don't know."

"Do you show?" Michael says. "In New York?"

"I just had a show," your boyfriend says. "I took a vacation to get away afterward. I'm wiped out."

"Oh, yeah," Michael says. "We've experienced something similar—Linda's father was nominated for an Academy Award last year—"

Here you manage to interrupt the conversation by saying it's time for the barbecue dinner and time to get on line. By dragging your boyfriend over to a table, you escape further conversation with the professional travelers.

After a sleepless night slapping mosquitoes, you get up early and spend the day roasting on the beach. The maître d' comes over to your lounge chairs and asks if you want one of the two offerings that night for dinner: boeuf bourguignon or churkey. "Jerky?" you say, thinking this is some sort of Haitian dried meat specialty.

It turns out the maître d' doesn't speak any English. You try to ask him, in French, if it would be possible to get a couple of lobsters for dinner. When you finish talking, the maître d' gives you a puzzled look. "You choose. Boeuf bourguignon or churkey."

You realize what you have in fact said to him was something along the lines of "We are wishing for a need for the lobsters to be prepared for the luncheon event." You are furious with yourself. You have studied French for years—elementary school, high school, college. But apparently none of the lessons have sunk in.

At every meal a three-piece band plays. The band only knows two songs. You call this band "The Royal Haitian Zombie Trio." You are sitting on the porch of your alpine hut, while your boyfriend sits under a tree on the beach listening to his Sony Walkman, when the three-piece combo band comes along. They are going from tree to tree, playing the two songs they know—"Yellow Bird" and "Que Sera, Sera"—to each group of sunbathers, for tips. When they arrive at your boyfriend's seat, one starts playing the bongo drums right next to his ear. Your boyfriend can't hear them, he doesn't even turn around. After a minute or so, your boyfriend feels the vibrations from the drum and he turns to look. He points to his ears, covered with headphones.

You start to laugh. One by one the band stops playing. By now they can hear you laughing, and they slink off. This is the only time during your stay that the band doesn't finish a tune.

The second night your boyfriend tries to figure out some sort of rigging to keep the mosquitoes from biting his ears. Finally he comes up with the idea of wearing your bikini bottom over his head. Just his face sticks out. "They're not going to get me tonight," he says.

It's strange to see a man wearing the bottom half of a bathing suit around his head, but you don't say anything. For a while before you fall asleep you watch the little Watchman TV. Both of you can't imagine traveling anywhere without it. There is only one channel, playing the Jim Jones/Guyana movie massacre dubbed into French. Then an elderly, pudgy singer, who resembles Liberace, sings rock-and-roll songs in French while three girls wearing duck masks dance behind him.

"It's funny," your boyfriend says, "I was just thinking, for kids who grow up not speaking any English, American rock-and-roll music must seem really strange. I mean, it can't make any sense to them."

You are pleased that, away from the pressures of New York, you and your boyfriend are actually communicating on an inti-

mate level. Now you are glad you have refrained from telling your boyfriend not to wear your bathing suit bottom around his head, even though he is probably stretching it out.

The next day your boyfriend can't get out of bed. You tell him he got too much sun the day before, but he says he has a tropical fever and goes back to sleep. He doesn't wake up all day.

You have always been a shy person; by the evening you are feeling lonesome. You go across the beach to the bar and have a hideous drink made in a blender, wishing you had the nerve to talk to someone. You decide you are mad at your boyfriend. He has a lot of nerve, bringing you here to the middle of nowhere and then falling prey to some jungle ailment.

Next to you are two glossy American boys, tanned, blond hair. They are very sure of themselves. They are hard at work sizing up a pretty French girl who is with her family. "How old do you think she is?" one says.

"Old enough!" the other says.

These guys might be anywhere in the world, it doesn't matter. They travel with their own permanent frat house over their heads. You would give anything to be so sure of yourself, so American. You decide the reason they're not speaking to you is that your nose is now bright red from the sun.

By the next day your boyfriend wakes. You spend another day on the beach. The food served at the restaurant has gotten worse and worse. For dinner that evening you are served bean and cabbage soup, piping hot; cubes of beef swimming in brown sauce and masses of potatoes. This would be a perfect meal at a ski resort. The temperature this evening has dropped to 85 degrees. Everyone eats with resignation. All the diners appear to have spent too much time in the sun. They look hectic, stricken—as if this were some peculiar sanatorium where one arrives in good health but shortly deteriorates. Where are all the delicious curries with coconut, the gumbos

and lobsters? The chef must really be deranged. The food seems to have been shipped from some terrible high school cafeteria.

All of a sudden you realize that the chairs in the restaurant are the most uncomfortable you have ever sat on. You figure you'll go and sit down on the couch in front of the reception desk. You have to get away from these restaurant chairs, even just for a minute. "I have to sit down over there," you say to your boyfriend. You are totally nauseated.

Your boyfriend looks surprised. You go and sit down on the couch, but after a minute you realize you can't sit there, either. You go back to your table. "What happened?" your boyfriend says. "You're all white."

"I can't stay here," you say. "I'm going to our room."

Your boyfriend helps you to your alpine hut. On the way things start to get a little black around the edges. "Aren't you going to have dinner?" your boyfriend says.

"I have to lie down," you say.

In the room you look in the mirror. Your tan is totally gone. It's just disappeared. Your skin hurts so much—especially on the back of your legs—that you can hardly stand up straight. You lie down on the bed and pass out.

A while later your boyfriend comes back with a roll and butter but you are too sick to eat.

The next day you sleep until early afternoon. Finally your boyfriend lets you go to the beach, wearing a T-shirt, long pants, his baseball cap, and sunglasses. You feel extremely fragile and feeble. Your skin is burned so badly you can only hobble a few steps at a time, but your boyfriend arranges a chaise longue for you in the shade under a tree.

You had so wanted to look glamorous, garbed in resort wear and with a dusky tan. You are not that kind of person. You now have skin like fried chicken, extra crispy.

"You know what?" you say to your boyfriend. He is fondling a chunk of coral, a large, smooth white object shaped like a

pipe. The beach is covered with such pieces. "I've decided I'm tired of being female."

"How come?" your boyfriend says.

"Oh, I feel like a female impersonator. All these hormones crashing around have nothing to do with me. It's like a facade. I'd much rather be a man. Would you still go out with me then?"

"You're hallucinating," your boyfriend says. "Sun poisoning."

You think, as the sun sets, there are plenty of good opportunities for tropical description. Purple sky, orange moon, yellow stars, dry silver leaves. It really is like a trashy postcard, complete with balmy winds and sea air. Once again the band plays "Yellow Bird."

Victor sat on the toilet; his nerves made him constipated. His body had abandoned him, at forty-two his hair was white and falling out daily. His fingernails were split and soft. He had to face the day as if it were a hallucination; at night he couldn't sleep. Around five each morning he would drift off, and by the time he managed to stagger into the gallery it would already be after noon. He missed important interviews, meetings with collectors; curators from San Francisco stopped by and left after forty-five minutes when he hadn't shown.

Nothing was going Victor's way. He should have spent more on real ceramic tiles. The linoleum in the gallery was already cracking near the bathroom on the upstairs floor. Gray squares creased with pink, this should have been elegant, but in comparison to Betsy Brown's black and white Italian tiles there was no comparison.

He had spent hours talking to Mark-Paul, going over his paintings, telling him how to improve them. A show was' arranged for January. Then one afternoon it was let slip that Mark-Paul had gone over to Betsy.

Prosperity! Prosperity was always just around the corner at Betsy Brown's gallery. She had managed to steal Mark-Paul Lachine right from under Victor Okrent's nose. How many days had he spent with Mark-Paul, taking him out to eat at the most important restaurants, lecturing him, filling him in on