The Sea Grape Tree (7 page)

Shad looked at Beth, shaking his head. “Next thing, people in America hear that they going to be harassed in Largo—”

“And the tourists stop coming.”

“Innocent or guilty, a woman can mash up everything the same way, yes.” Shad stood up, stretching his arms overhead. “Nothing simple, eh?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
he wide silver bangle on Sonja's wrist reflected the candlelight, making the flame appear fatter, brighter. Everything about the writer sparkled with her delight at Roper's return, her full lips and cheeks glowing.

“Where've you been playing lately, Ford?” she asked. All heads turned to the end of the dining table where the newest guest was sitting.

“New York, right?” Roper said. He wore a scarlet mandarin shirt that matched the wine he was sipping.

Fordham Monroe looked up from his roast beef. He was tall enough to have to bend over the dinner plate, his slim fingers extending almost the lengths of the knife and fork in his hands. The furrow between his eyes seemed to be debating his answer.

“Didn't you tell me on the phone you were taking a gig in the Village?” Roper prompted, stroking the deep grooves beside his mouth that brought carved furniture to mind.

Ford dropped his hands to his lap. “I've been giving the trumpet a rest since London, man.”

“A rest?” Roper asked. “What do you mean?” Probing ever deeper was always his pattern, it seemed, and Sarah winced inwardly in sympathy, remembering how it felt to be the subject of Roper's scrutiny only two days before on his return to Largo. Strolling around the studio, he'd pointed out that the dimensions of his life-size canvases ­allowed the onlooker to
connect
with his subjects, and he'd lectured her about her own work as if she were a wayward student.

“What I love about your work,” he'd said in an agonized voice, “is the perfection
of it. Your symbolism is strong, your intricate composition is wonderful, your strokes clean and precise. But,
why,
in God's name, do you have to contract life to a few
inches
? It's as if you create these masterpieces and don't want anyone to see them.”

“I believe,” Sarah had said after only a second's hesitation, “that my work is a microcosm of life. Whatever my subject matter is, I like to scale it down to force the viewers to look inside my frame in a totally focused way.”

“You want to frustrate them, you mean.” Roper ran his hand through his wiry gray hair while he said it. She hadn't made up her mind if she liked him or hated him. The experience of living in the home—a beautiful home, to boot—of an affluent black man was still sinking in with her. It was the first time she remembered being the only white person in a group, certainly in a home, and she still didn't know how she felt about it. True, Sonja had been sweet and nonthreatening, Carthena had been civil, but Roper's arrival had given her the clear understanding that she was the guest of a black man, eating his food, living under his roof, having to please him with her art. And Roper was no ordinary man. He was eloquent, arrogant, stylish to a fault, and fully confident of the rightness of his opinions.

“Tell me the truth, how many do you sell a year?” Roper had raised one eyebrow like a mandarin in judgment. “Maybe you don't have to live off your work like the rest of us, but the question is, do you paint for yourself or for others? It's all well and good for people to appreciate your work, but you want them to take it home and put money in your bank account.”

Her mother's favorite expression had come back to her.
Don't make a fuss, dear,
she'd say, always accompanied by a patting of Sarah's hand.

“The kind of buyer I'm looking for, Roper, is someone who sees the layers in my work, who understands the intimacy of my connection with them.” She didn't mean to imply (even though she'd thought it) that a man in his midfifties who enjoyed being the center of attention, who painted large nudes of women because he knew they'd sell, wouldn't understand true intimacy.

Roper was not a man to be contradicted, however generous he was to his household guests, and few had the stomach to oppose him for long. Sarah had already concluded that her host relished the presence of his guests and whatever muse they brought to his home for one reason—he enjoyed controlling them. Confident and paternalistic, he'd throw out his opinions, emphasizing every word, sometimes spacing them so that each lingered in the air with authority.

“It's time to let your audience
live
the work, to put
themselves
in the scene,” he'd said, a smile playing around his large, square lips. “They can't do that if they have to shrink like Alice to see them.”

Halfway through the afternoon, Sarah realized she was no match for the man, especially since she was his guest, and she lied that she was already sketching larger works. “Do you have anything to show me yet?” he wanted to know.

“I'll tell you when I'm ready,” she'd answered, and made an excuse to go back to her room.

Ford looked down at his roast beef and resumed cutting it. “It's not just that Jewel couldn't come, man. She had a miscarriage. It hit her hard, it hit us both hard.” He was talking so softly in his Southern accent that Sarah strained forward to catch his words. “We've had a rough time of it and she's moved out. It's over.”

“Oh, God,” Sonja said, her carrot-laden fork in midair. “We had no idea, Ford. I'm so sorry.”

“How awful,” Sarah mumbled. She liked Ford and his gentle, studied manner. He seemed like someone who would appreciate small paintings.

“That's life, right?” Ford's voice got matter-of-fact as he refilled his glass with burgundy. “Thought it might be best if I got out of the city for a few weeks. There are worse places than Jamaica to chill out. Sorry I didn't give you a heads-up before I came, but I—”

“We're glad you came,” Sonja said. “It'll give you both some time to get over it. Maybe things will change by the time you get back.” Roper was looking at Sonja, allowing her to speak for him, but the writer had run out of words, and the sound of silverware chafing against plates took the place of conversation.

The swing door to the kitchen opened. “Finished?” Carthena asked, her puff sleeves and aproned skirt reminding Sarah of a chocolate Swiss maid ready to burst into song.

“I'm done,” Ford said. He laid his fork down and looked up at the young woman with a dutiful widening of lips.

“But you haven't finished,” the helper protested, shaking her beads.

“I've had enough for tonight.”

“You didn't like it?”

“It was delicious. I don't have much of an appetite.”

“I going to cook some nice food for you. We need to fatten you up.” Carthena's smile remained fixed while she collected the dinner plates, and Sarah wondered if she'd heard some of their earlier talk.

“Carthena cooks a mean escoveitch fish,” Roper said. “Can we have that for breakfast tomorrow?”

“Nobody make it better than me,” the woman said, beaming. “I'll buy some fresh snapper in the morning.”

By the time they moved to the deck with a pot of coffee and a tray of cups and saucers, some sense of normalcy had returned, although the hostess made sure to serve Ford his coffee first. Around them, fireflies—
peeny wallies,
Roper called them—buzzed in and out of the darkened bushes.

Settling back into a lounge chair with her coffee cup, Sarah pointed to the lights on the far end of the bay. “I went walking over there a couple days ago. There's a bar there, right?”

“A bar and a house on the hill—there on the left. It's a beautiful house where a family called the Delgados live,” Sonja explained. “That other light—lower down, see—is the bar. It's on a cliff overlooking the water.”

“Sounds lovely,” Sarah said. “I met the bartender when I was taking a walk.” She decided to say nothing about the man's warning, which, remembered on a soft tropical evening, now seemed like an overreaction.

“We'll take you there,” Sonja said. “It's a cute bar, very—rustic.”

“It's right across from an island,” Roper added. “We'll go before sunset so you can see it.”

Ford leaned forward, showing some energy for the first time. “Do they have music in the bar?”

“Not much live music,” Sonja answered, shrugging. “An American man owns it.”

Roper entertained them with the bar owner's saga, and they all tsk-tsked about the hurricane that had wiped the roofs off the villagers' houses and resulted in the death of the hotel and the birth of an island.

“You think your problems are bigger than everyone else's,” Ford said, “but there's always someone with a tougher story.”

“I hear an investor's come down to talk to Eric about building another hotel,” Roper interjected. “Maybe there's hope for him after all.”

After the hosts had excused themselves, Ford and Sarah continued sitting on the deck. They listened for a while to a CD that Roper had put on before he went to bed, and the trumpeter explained that he and his band had recorded it live last year at Ravinia, an open-air theater near Chicago. All around them, the squeaks and honks of crickets and frogs accompanied the music. Sipping a second cup of coffee, Ford commented on the many bright stars overhead, and they compared notes on the difficulty of stargazing in urban centers, a mutual pet peeve, it turned out.

“When I was little,” Sarah said, “my father took me to this village where my uncle had a church—he was an Anglican minister—just south of Scotland. We went walking on a country road one night, and I remember being all bundled up and my father pointing out the stars. They were so bright, just amazing.”

“That's a great memory.”

“Funnily enough, I don't have a lot of memories from childhood.” She laughed. “There are these great blocks of time that are blank, for some reason. Maybe that comes from living a pretty monotonous life.”

Ford had lots of memories. He talked of watching the night sky in the summer. He would sit on his aunt's dock in South Carolina in the evening with his cousins, and they would see how many stars they could count. “When we gave up, we'd count the shooting stars.”

Listening to Ford, seeing one half of his face dimly lit by the living room lights, Sarah guessed that he was anywhere between thirty-five and forty-five. There were no wrinkles on his face, despite the late nights he kept, so he might have been younger rather than older. There was something likable about his mouth with its raised outer edges, something refined about his nose. And while he spoke nostalgically, she began to suspect they'd been left alone on purpose by Sonja and Roper.

Her companion now talked about playing the trumpet in the South, and how much he enjoyed jamming with musicians from New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina, and she noticed for the first time a diamond on one side of his long nose that glimmered when he turned toward her. And while he spoke, she wondered how it would feel to run her hand over his close-cropped head, if it would feel coarse or smooth, although there was no chance of them becoming lovers even if she wanted to—which she didn't. His wounds were too fresh.

It was only later, while she was changing into her pajamas, that she knew that the real reason she wouldn't sleep with Ford, or even flirt with him, was more about the fact that she'd never found a black man appealing. She'd had a few high school and art school classmates who were first-generation West Indians or Africans, but no close friends who were anything other than white. Penny, of course, had all kinds of friends, including Zoey, a Barbadian TV producer who dropped in at least once a month, and her roommate's circle often included a black boyfriend.

“I was telling my mother,” Penny had commented after starting an affair with a Nigerian engineer, “that it's a different time and place. People are just people, for God's sake.”

Sarah had nodded but hadn't been sure how she felt about it herself. She had nothing against black men per se, but they didn't start the adrenaline rushing for her. At the bottom of it, she thought, was the awkwardness of cultural differences, even if it was a new day. It was enough of a nuisance meshing with any boyfriend, much less one who ate strange food and had a mother you couldn't understand.

Somewhere between pounding her pillow and laying her head on it, Sarah decided that part of the reason she'd accepted Roper's invitation was that Naomi had confirmed that he had a lovely home and a live-in girlfriend. He was middle class and she was safe. No, she was not having a relationship with anyone in Jamaica. It was definitely not in the cards.

CHAPTER NINE

I
t was no secret that Daniel Caines had become a tourist, had gone to see the lagoon at Blue Hole, had shopped in the Ocho Rios craft market and gone into the underground caves in St. Ann, according to his reports to Eric. It was also no secret that he was having a nightly romp with Janet. By way of announcing it, the seamstress was now hanging on to his arm wherever he went, and Eric had more than once imagined the woman's rounded buttocks pounding up and down on Caines.

When the investor and his girlfriend had come into the bar one night, the man almost luminescent, like he'd just had a monstrous orgasm followed by a hot shower, Eric had decided that he better move things along at a faster clip, since Caines clearly had too much free time. The next morning he'd called Horace MacKenzie to set up their meeting.

The meeting with Lambert Delgado the week before had gone well. Eric and Caines had walked up the Delgados' driveway to that meeting, between the mango and grapefruit trees, with Eric again describing his swim across when the eye of the hurricane was passing over and dragging himself up onto Lambert's verandah, “naked as a baby,” and pounding on the door. Caines had only murmured, “Hmm,” his eyes roaming over the modern, plantation-style house before them.

They'd finally arrived, with a fair amount of panting on Eric's part, at two minutes after eleven, the appointed time. Lambert, large and beige, had come through the elegant living room with arms extended to his visitors, welcoming them. He apologized for not making it to the party. He'd been in Kingston buying lumber, he said.

The middle-aged contractor was Eric's best friend. Apart from sheltering the homeless hotel owner during the hurricane, Lambert had given him a room to live in for a year after, before the bar and apartment were built. He'd let Eric's son, Joseph, use an office in the house when he came to write the business proposal. And now he was giving his services as contractor for the new hotel at a major discount—as a gift to Largo, he said.

After the introductions, Eric, Lambert, and Danny had moved to the long verandah and its white rocking chairs and were served Red Stripe beers by Miss Bertha, the chunky housekeeper whose hips just fit into her plaid uniform.

“You don't come up here for a long time,” she'd teased Eric. “Now that your son is gone, you scarce as good gold.”

“Don't worry, Miss Bertha, you going to have plenty chance to see me,” Eric had answered in his American patois. “When we start building, you see me every day.”

An easy icebreaker came up at the start of the meeting: the city of New York. All three men had lived there at some point. And although Lambert and Danny had lived there in different decades, they acted like they shared something that Eric didn't, and he knew it was that they had both been Caribbean men struggling through college in a big white city. Eric had joined in the discussion about living in Manhattan in the seventies and eighties, referring to the Village as if he'd gone there often, careful not to mention that he'd never attended university and had lived a very different life from theirs.

Having warmed up to the matter at hand, Lambert had run his fingers across his handlebar mustache. “How long are you planning to be here?” he'd said, nodding to Caines.

“It's kind of a working holiday, so I'd say another couple weeks. I want to get to know Jamaica better if I'm going to make an investment here, you know. I've been visiting places, reading up about stuff—about the economy, the recent election.”

“And you know we have political confusion, right?” Lambert joked, winking at Eric. “But I bet you never read about the time it takes to get government approvals—”

“I heard about that.”

“Then you'd better plan to stay another month, my friend, because we need to get permits from the Parish Council here, and we have to attend several meetings to justify the construction. I really think you should be here for that. The Council will want to ask you about your businesses overseas.”

“I don't know—it's been difficult connecting with my business, what with poor cell phone coverage here and Miss Mac not being on the Internet. My mother is handling everything back home, but I like to stay in touch. I may have to come and go.”

“I'm telling you,” Lambert had assured him, “it takes the patience of Job to do business here, just bear that in mind.” By the time the meeting ended, Caines and Lambert were calling each other
my man,
had made a date to go out on the golf course, and were sounding more and more like black Americans.

In contrast to the visit with Lambert, the meeting with Horace went poorly from the beginning. Eric had forgotten to warn Caines that Horace had never been on time since he'd known him and, one hour after they'd arrived at Horace's office above a Port Antonio bread shop, they were still waiting. Caines kept looking at his watch and recrossing his legs. The stale
Lawyers Today
magazines displayed on the side table remained untouched. On several occasions, Danny paced to the open window and looked down at the lane outside.

“What time was our appointment?” he asked the elderly receptionist on one of his trips. She assured him that Mr. MacKenzie knew he was to meet with them but had to go to court. She was expecting him
momentarily,
she said, frowning at his American petulance.

When the slender lawyer appeared two hours after the scheduled time, his black robe thrown over his arm, Caines appeared to be in no mood to be civil, but he held his tongue, his thin lips thinner than usual. Eric got the conversation rolling with a question about the campsite. In answer and without asking for their approval, Horace lit a cigarette with his graceful mocha fingers and exhaled a cone of smoke that was quickly dispersed by the overhead fan.

“I've spoken to some guys, friends of mine, and we're ready to lease the island once you get the hotel construction started.”

“Everything is going well so far,” Eric said. “Your mother has agreed to sell the land—Danny spoke with her—so that's okay. We've started the construction discussions with Lambert Delgado, no problem there. And we're on board about leasing you the island. But there's one thing, the electricity and water—”

“We had a thought,” Caines interjected. “Since there aren't any working utilities on the island, of course, since the hurricane, we were wondering if your group would want to install solar panels and cisterns for electricity and water. Make the place self-sustaining, you know, cheaper than paying utility bills. You could design and build just the way you want, in the locations you want. And it would be the kind of eco-friendly stuff your tourists would go for.”

Horace scrutinized them, his cigarette at a right angle with his fingers, and his bony chin jutting toward them. “Are you telling me that you're expecting us to put in the infrastructure for you, to pay for it ourselves, is that what you're saying?”

Caines stretched his neck to one side. “We thought you might be open to working with us—”

“You're joking, right? That was never mentioned before.”

“If you construct, we can deduct it from the lease, month by month, you know.”

Horace sat back, shrugging the shoulders of his cream linen jacket. “We already have to install tents and a kitchen and bathrooms. Now we're talking basic infrastructure.” His eyes narrowed. “How much more is that going to cost?”

“Not much, probably twenty, twenty-five thousand US, mostly for the purchase of solar panels and the construction of an underground cistern and plumbing. The installation of the roofs should be fairly cheap if you use zinc sheets and gutters.” Horace glowered, Caines wouldn't budge, and things seemed to have reached an impasse until Eric asked about the necessary documents to form a company.

An hour later in the afternoon-empty bar, the bar owner poured himself a scotch, a rare indulgence, and sat down at his table with the newspaper.

“Didn't go well,” he complained to Shad, who was leaving for his lunch break.

“What happen?”

“We had to tell Horace there were no utilities and—”

“Danny didn't tell him that if he did it, we would deduct the cost from the rent?”

“How'd you know?” Eric said. He finished the scotch in one swig and grimaced. “Horace didn't like the idea one bit. I can't imagine where Caines got it from.”

“I give it to him,” Shad said, to which Eric stared at him—his trusted employee, whom he'd insisted should be a minority partner in the new hotel, giving advice to his business partner behind his back. The bartender disappeared with an apologetic shrugging of shoulders, while his boss poured himself another shot and opened the
Gleaner
.

Unaccustomed to drinking hard liquor, Eric soon had trouble making sense of the words in front of him. He put down the paper and looked across at Simone Island, baking in the two o'clock sunlight. Six months earlier, he would have rowed out to see her, would have told her about the meeting with Horace, and she would have said something he needed to hear. He poured a third shot and swallowed it quickly, rebuking himself at the same time. A tingling started in his groin, the scotch going to places he'd almost forgotten, places that made him think of her, and of Caines and his after-sex glow. He stood up with inebriated determination, went searching in the drawer where he kept his ledger book and odd notes, and found a pink Post-it note with an Atlanta phone number. She answered right away.

“How you doing, Simone?” He was trying not to slur, holding his tongue and teeth apart.

“Great! How is the hotel coming along?”

“Danny Caines is here, your brother's client.”

“How is that going?” She sounded like she was eating something.

“So far, so good, you know, long way to go. Do you know him, Caines, I mean?”

“No, but Cameron seems to like him a lot.”

“I think he's on board, but you know how it is here. He's finding some things hard to accept, and then other things”—thinking of the man's shining face—“he seems to like a lot.”

“Like what?”

Eric cleared his throat. “He loves the ocean, kind of like you. He runs every morning on the beach, swims, that kind of thing.”

“Like a Jamerican.” She laughed. It was a term she'd used to describe herself once. They'd been eating June plums, he remembered, the juice dripping down her chin.

“He's from St. Croix.”

“Cameron hadn't mentioned that.”

“So,” he said, and looked up at a car pulling into the parking lot, “what have you been doing? Still not working?”

She paused, either to chew or think. “I'm working on Celeste's room, deciding what to keep and what to store. I'm still working that through, you know. I've joined a group for parents who've—it helps a lot—knowing that other people have . . .” Her voice faded away, then got stronger when she started speaking again. “And I've been applying for jobs with nonprofits, working with troubled youth, that kind of thing. I'm not going back to corporate, like I told you. My head just isn't into the whole advertising thing anymore.”

“I mish you.” It had come out wrong, his lips and teeth getting lazy. The customer, a man in jeans, was locking his car door, would soon want a drink.

“What was that?”

Eric licked his lips. “I miss you.”

“You miss me? That's very sweet, Eric.”

“I was thinking about you all of a sudden, looking at the island. Shumtimes—”

“Are you okay, Eric?” She almost sounded like Claire, his ex, her concern laced with criticism.

“I had a drink. Hard day today, you know.”

“Maybe you should call back another time and we can talk about it. I was just going out, anyway. What about tomorrow?”

“Okay, I'll call you.”

Eric replaced the phone and nodded to the man approaching the counter.

“A beer? Coming right up, shir.”