Sparrow Nights (7 page)

Sometime later, near two in the morning, I heard a commotion downstairs and the outside light went on. I got up quietly and tiptoed over in the dark. There was a click, then another click. Then the sound of confused German. They were trying the air conditioner. Click, click, then silence. Then more clicks, then more German. Finally I crawled back into bed. I think I even laughed into the pillow so they couldn’t hear.

Near three I woke up. I was itching like mad. I took a table fork and scratched the bottoms of my feet; they were on fire. I scratched and scratched. Then my scalp went off, then a patch on my back that I could only reach with my hairbrush. My pillow smelt funny. There must have been some kind of fungus in my room, a tropical fungus I was allergic to.

I went down to the main desk. It turned out they had an empty room; it had come free that night. Was this about the air conditioner, sir? No, this was another problem. They moved me. It was an identical room and I stood in the doorway, sniffing. I could smell that same musty air; my scalp started to itch. No good, I said. I went back to the desk. The night manager was called, an immaculate Spaniard with a toothbrush moustache. He listened to me carefully. He translated to his assistant. I heard the word
rojo
, three times. They must have been referring to my red face.

“I think you are allergic to the hotel,” he said.

But I was exhausted, my scalp alive with red ants, the soles of my feet on fire, and in no mood to be trifled with. “Are you making fun of me?” I said.

He leaned forward with a patronizing smile. “I beg your pardon.”

“Est-ce que vous vous moquez de moi?”
I repeated with considerable force, going on to add that I was a respected professor of literature, that I didn’t give a monkey’s shit about the cost of things, that I wasn’t going to remain on the premises an instant longer, and would he immediately arrange for another hotel. That seemed to turn the tide and very shortly he made me a proposition in exquisite French.

“Would you like to try one of our villas?” he asked. “They were built forty years before the main hotel, using different materials. You may find it more comfortable.”

“At the same price?” I asked, my eyes involuntarily avoiding his.

He bowed gracefully. Moments later I was in a little golf cart, whisked to the pool end of the property, the moonlight dancing on the green water. The driver led me up the stairs to a sumptuous chateau and opened the door. I stepped inside. It was a two-floor affair, a television set, a living room, thick gold carpeting. The air smelt of salt and cleaning agents.

“Perfect,” I said, and tipped the man five dollars.

But in the end the tropics are a depressing place, so sad, and after a few days, even in my lovely digs, I longed to go home. I wanted to wait a bit longer, let this business
avec les chiens
die down a bit. I didn’t want problems, conversations with frowning neighbours, the police maybe.

The question is, though, what to do in the tropics? I didn’t dare go near the pool: I knew I’d see the girl from the airplane there for sure, sunning herself and ruining my day. So I stayed in my room and read three consecutive Georges Simenon novels. Problem was, of course, within a few days I had exhausted my library, and a kind of nervousness set in as I finished off the final few pages of
Mémoires Intimes
before dinner. What would I do for the rest of the week? I ambled down to dinner, but because I was the only guest in the hotel without a family, entire tables looked away when I walked in, terrified, I think, that I might join them, that they might be stuck with me for the rest of the vacation.

Somewhere near nine I overhead a Dutch woman in the lobby telling someone there was a bookstore in another hotel a half-mile down the beach. I hurried along an illuminated flagstone path, moths darting here and there, anxious in case someone should get there before me and take the last good book. You can imagine my delight when, after spinning the book rotisserie, I came across
Monsieur Hire
on the bottom row, a Simenon I’d never read. But then I caught myself doing something rather odd: I
kept
looking. I looked at a John le Carré novel, I looked at a Tom Clancy novel, I even contemplated a biography of Perry Como. And in so doing I experienced the sudden conviction, as if I had just spotted a fault line in a cliff face, that I was never going to be happy, that I was, in fact, incapable of it; that I was doomed to spend the rest of my days doing precisely this, trying to improve on something that had, only moments before, seemed like the very embodiment of happiness itself.

To wit: A couple of nights later I smoked a joint on the beach with a wild-haired boy from Texas, and on the way back to my room it struck me that my time with Emma had been a kind of gorgeous treading water but that her
absence
(follow me here) provided, in itself, a kind of happiness because it gave me a precise object of desire, without actually giving me the thing itself, the ultimate possession of which could only diminish the pleasure that came from wanting it so unequivocally. It was a
pensée
so exhausting that I had to take a taxi into town immediately, where, sitting on a milk crate, I devoured an entire deep-fried fish, even the head.

The days passed slowly, symphonically, as they do when you’re bored and lonely. Morning, afternoon, evening, three parts, all lasting far too long. At nightfall I had a strong rum drink in a bar down the beach to push away the haunted feeling that came over me every nightfall, the sense that the day was over, that there remained no more possibilities; that the store, so to speak, was closed till morning. Ahead lay a long night of twittering frogs and laughter from the pool (how isolating that sound is).

On my last night in town I put on a freshly laundered shirt and white slacks and a straw hat that suited me rather well and left the compound to have dinner at a well-known restaurant about fifteen miles away. It was a cliffside establishment, candles on the tables, the surf hissing below,
très intime
, and I sat at a small table near the edge. A full moon hung over the water.

I was there only a few minutes when a couple, dressed to the nines, he in a blazer, she in a shimmery blue dress, crossed the patio and sat at the table directly in front of me. It was the girl from the airplane. With her black hair brushed back, a touch of eyeliner, she looked so fantastic, so alluring in the candlelight—her eyes appeared black, her skin with a beauty mark on the collarbone—that for a second I considered cancelling my order. But I didn’t and made a decision, for better or worse, to simply drink through it.

The table beside them cleared; a couple sat down, a stocky young man and his blonde wife; soon talk flew between the tables (how quickly people that age make friends!), laughter spilled up into the salty air … A story about a madman on the beach, a mix-up at the hotel check-in; a night in the mountains (“there was a rat, it was sitting on his
head!”);
lightning-fast ripostes (how fast they think, the sheer speed of it).

I ordered a fish dinner, red snapper. It took an hour, as it always does in the Caribbean, and by the time it arrived I was already drunk and had quite lost my appetite. I was thinking about Emma, that this gathering at the next table was precisely the kind of thing in which she had so often tried to include me, an evening with her friends. But they didn’t interest me, to be honest. They weren’t stupid, they were just too young, and I never went, not a wedding, not a dinner, not a party, not once in the whole three years.

“Would you like to join us?”

I looked around. It was the girl from the airplane.

“Me?” I said.

This provoked a volley of well-meaning laughter.

“Yes, you’re all by yourself.”

I picked up my drink. A waiter raced over as if I were in danger of toppling into the sea (perhaps I was) and, taking my glass, led me to their table. I sat down between her and her husband. Introductions were made (“My name is Jennifer and this is …”). I could smell her perfume.

“We’ve only been here two days,” said the stocky young man, “but we’re ready to leave already.” That too set off another volley of laughter. After days and days of talking to myself, I felt quite giddy to have company and I laughed too.

Leaning forward abruptly, Jennifer started in on a story about growing up on Long Island, a father who read voraciously, a freckled boy at a dance. Her dress shimmered when she moved and I could see down her front. I had a feeling she knew it and knew I was looking and had had just enough to drink to find it cozily fine. Her voice, I noticed, had an odd tribble to it. That must be what Daisy Buchanan’s voice sounded like, I thought.

Now the blonde woman took the floor. Suddenly we were in Tokyo. “We were on a game show. Everyone watched; they couldn’t
believe
we could speak Japanese.” She touched her husband’s arm. “Or
he
could anyway. I was a few pounds heavier then and boy, did it ever show on television. I was never so embarrassed.”

Her husband jumped in. “We couldn’t get our modem to work over there. We ended up calling collect to New York, like
twelve
times! Finally they shipped us a new one—by courier. It was
wild.”

“Did you say something?” Jennifer whispered. The stocky young man was impersonating a Japanese bank manager.

In the tones of a gentleman making conversation (but, in fact, angling for exclusive attention), I said, “Actually, I was thinking about an old girlfriend.”

“Was it a sad thought?”

“I was just thinking how much she would have enjoyed an evening like this.”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come she didn’t enjoy an evening like this?”

“Because I didn’t socialize with her. She was too young.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly embarrassed.

“What?”

“Then
we
must seem rather young too.”

Laughter rose up as the stocky man put a sandal to his ear like a telephone.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “And neither did she. Now that I think about it.”

“But you like younger women?”

“I have to, really. The ones my age are all dead.”

“I thought so,” she said. She was fiddling with her spaghetti strap now, turning it between her finger and her thumb. Leaning forward.

“That all the women my age are dead? You really
thought
that?”

“You remind me a little bit of my father, actually. He prefers younger women too. That’s how he says it. He says, ‘I prefer young women, dear.’”

“You like your father?”

“Oh, terribly.” Here a hand sought the back of her neck.

“What are you two talking about?” her husband asked, turning a handsome, open face to us.

“My father,” she replied.

“Ah,” he said diplomatically, and turned back to his conversation.

“They don’t get along,” Jennifer whispered.

Across the table the blonde woman had moved on to movies. “I just don’t think he’s a very good actor, that’s all,” she said, popping an ice cube into her mouth and crunching down loudly on it.

“Who?”

“Oh, what’s his name? That
guy
. Christopher somebody.”

“Christopher Walken?”

“That’s him.”

“You don’t think Christopher
Walken
is a good actor?”

Jennifer returned her attention to me. “So you’re here by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Seems like an odd place to come by yourself.”

“I needed to get away.”

“Woman trouble? That’s another of my father’s expressions.”

“No, actually. I poisoned my neighbour’s dogs.”

After a moment she said, “How drunk are you?”

“Quite.”

“Is that true?”

“What?”

“That you poisoned your neighbour’s dogs.”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“I
have dogs.”

“Well, keep them away from me.”

And on it went. We had more drinks, hard liquor this round, and after a while we left the restaurant, the five of us cramming into a taxi, women on men’s laps, and drove into town. We ended up in a thumping second-floor discotheque near two in the morning. I went in the door and the bass hit me so hard in the chest that I wondered for a second if it was interfering with the rhythm of my heart. We sat around an absurdly small table in a dark corner. White rum and Cokes all around.

Leaning back in his chair, Jennifer’s husband was watching the dance floor with something like amusement.

“Don’t you dance, Professor?” he asked.

“Never,” I said.

“Never?” shouted the stockbroker.

“Sometimes I
slow
dance,” I said, but my words got lost in the smoke and the rolling bass line.

“What?” someone hollered across the table, frowning.

I cupped my hands over my mouth. “It’s not worth repeating.”

“I’ve heard people say that before,” Jennifer’s husband threw in. (Was he taking a turn for the sour?) “It means he wants someone to
ask
him to dance.”