Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

This is untrue, but she seems to believe it. And for a minute the array of past scenes we share undergoes a drastic shift in perspective. As if the effulgent young goddess who sat wreathed with admirers, playing the guitar badly in a New Year’s blizzard, had actually been trying to impress me with her clowning. The funny thing is how little the truth matters now, just as it doesn’t matter whether we are really friends. Now we are simply a pair of women, not yet old, each trying in vain to create something useful out of her memories: something protective, perhaps, like foul-weather gear.

With clothes in mind, I tell her about wearing her green dress to the dance. “You’re kidding,” she says. “That Jackie Kennedy thing? That was one of the ugliest dresses I ever had.”

“I know,” I say. “It looked terrible on me.”

At four o’clock Gus climbs into her Jeep and backs up, swearing softly in French as she struggles with the clutch. She calls out to me to keep my pecker up, and I shout something bawdy in return. Then, through the windshield, I watch her bright head catch the afternoon sunlight, flare up and fade as she disappears down the street, past lofty elms and Victorian houses. I pause for a minute in the driveway, wondering where and when we’ll see each other next, and as I do it occurs to me for absolutely the first time to wonder whether there is a hidden logic to this sparse set of encounters across oceans and years. Like a science fiction story, where isolated flashes from space turn out to be parts of a coded dispatch. And even if there is no interstellar communiqué, I think, there certainly exists some dull celestial chamber of protocol where the number of my meetings with Gus has already been fixed. Standing in the deep summer shade, I try, for a few heartbeats, to guess how many we have left.

Dancing with Josefina

“Thanks, I’d love to.” So, if I recall correctly, begins a Dorothy Parker monologue, set in similar circumstances. But what I actually say is “Sí, gracias.” Adding a coy dip of the eyelashes that any film director would nix as being over the top, but which to my mind gives me the authentic air of belonging to the local population of nubile señoritas. There is no need to move to the center of the dance floor, since we are already there, already molten with the heat, crushed in the pullulating Friday night crowd at Bobby’s, a harbor club where the jump-ups get so packed and wild that the pilings shudder like an earthquake, and eels and remoras swarm to devour the beer vomit in the spotlit sea below. We’re in the Bay Islands of Honduras, which are the usual Caribbean crucible of races. The mob of dancers swirls with teak- and amber-colored faces, legacy of Hispanic sailors, English pirates, Maroon slaves, Mosquito Indians. Over the alternating beats of salsa and reggae rises the buzz of Spanish and the lilt of island English. Adrift in the whole mad brew are a few Americans. Me, for example, an unabashed tourist. And my husband, Rory, and our expatriate friend Mitch, who are presently hailing me with Dos Equis bottles out of the sweltering press at the bar. And also this gentleman, quite a senior gentleman, who left his little cluster of friends—gray-haired fellows with a lot of rum under their belts, yachtsmen’s brick complexions, and the look of timid but relentless hunger that marks the sex tourist—to squeeze up next to me. He put a large pinkish paw on my elbow—respectfully, it must be said—and, in halting phrasebook Spanish, asked me to dance.

It’s rare to have the opportunity to make mischief with such ease. So simple to break off eye contact with husband and friend across the room. To give that little falsely modest flicker of the lashes and make a simpering reply in the few words of Spanish I know, and begin moving thorax and pelvis in a way that suggests that I pulled on my scanty cotton dress in one of the shacks that stand on stilts out in the water, in the town named after a buccaneer who holed up there to feast and fornicate. Easy to pretend that I am not a coddled North American black woman, aged thirty-one, the kind of young woman this man might encounter in an investment bank, or see on the podium at an academic conference. That I am much younger and poorer, that the genes for my dark skin arrived from Africa along the thoroughfares opened by the conquistadors, rather than the more northerly Protestant channels of the Georgian slavers. That the boundaries of my education were marked not by a graduate degree but by the dusty walls of the island elementary school, where geckos scuttle and boards hide the windows the hurricane shattered. That I’m not married to Rory, a white lawyer from Delaware, who might be this man’s nephew, or son. And that perhaps I’d be just desperate enough to trade a few blow jobs for a charm bracelet, or a pair of running shoes, or even the fata morgana of a U.S. passport.

“Sí, gracias. Bailamos.”

It would be too easy to detest him immediately, so I’ll take my time. Dispassionately I observe how he starts to wag his buttocks, in innocent khaki shorts, to the truly wonderful music, which the deejay has magicked into a weird dub fusion: a Caribbean male voice intoning salacious directives over a Latin beat. It’s hot muscular sound that you have to obey, and, packed around us, gorgeous Honduran kids, their faces incandescent with sweat, are humping away as if their lives depended on it. My partner makes it clear that he would like to hump me too—his friends, after all, are watching. They loosed a faint cheer and raised their glasses when we started dancing. But I keep myself a hygienic inch