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

from his soaked polo shirt and make it look like seductive teasing. I improvise an undulating mishmash of bumps and grinds with a sort of samba-limbo-macarena flavor. I’ve never been a good dancer, but I once had a Puerto Rican boyfriend who made me appear to have rhythm. The guy in front of me, of course, belongs to a whole different category of bad dancing: the juggernaut school. I haven’t looked at him closely yet. Except to note that he’s large and red and old.

“Cómo te llamas?” Shouted over the music.

What’s that? Oh, a name, a name. Maria would be too absurd, and for some reason, all the other names that spring to mind are unequivocally Nordic. Helga—no. Although Frieda brings to mind magnificent Kahlo, Mexican icon with her baroque costumes and Byzantine monobrow. Gabriela—no. Erendira? Let’s stay away from magic realism.

“Josefina,” I reply. Congratulating myself on a good serviceable choice, with an imperial resonance to it—Napoleon’s consort was, after all, a Caribbean girl. And as I announce my alias, I begin—with my lashes still modestly lowered—my inventory. Age: mid-sixties. Genre: American Anglo-Saxon or Celt. Accent: from what I can gather, mid-Atlantic. Feet: large, size twelve at least, in battered blue-and-white Top-Siders—an upper-middle-class indicator, like the khakis and the shirt with the midget alligator and the diver’s watch. Sunburnt freckled arms and legs with the muscle mass of a former team player: football or hockey. And a belly that on a woman would mean pregnancy of about seven months.

I get irritated as I observe this belly jiggling insouciantly to the beat. What whacking arrogance it takes for the possessor of a Brobdingnagian gut like this even to dream of aspiring to dancing with a pretty girl thirty years younger. Yet wherever I’ve traveled in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, I’ve seen similar woeful sights. Dropsical bellies, spindling shanks, speckled pates, wistful salt-and-pepper attempts at Hemingway beards, Frank Zappa ponytails made up of a few white hairs. All displayed by visiting men—tourists not interested in antiquities, because they’re in ruins themselves. These cruel signs of sovereign time would be touching if they weren’t always exhibited at the sides of dewy local beauties—young goddesses, in fact, whose skin is black or brown or yellow. My honeymoon flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok was packed with Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, Italians. All of them well over fifty. All of them with the same expression of complacent anticipation—consumer anticipation, like housewives headed for a reliable supermarket. I was tempted to get up and make a speech. What a sight that would have been: Susanna lecturing the elders. But what would one say but “Shame”? And shame, it is well known, is in the eye of the beholder.

Some oaf just stomped on my foot and nearly blew my cover. Not the guy I’m dancing with, who is surprisingly nimble, a bit like a boogying Santa. No, it was a local kid crushed up next to us—actually not an oaf but a teenager with a shaved head, a child’s face, and steel muscles under a sweaty Ziggy Marley T-shirt. The kind of partner I should be dancing with—would love to be in bed with, in all honesty, though out of respect for my dear husband, Rory, standing five yards across the crowd, I’ll suppress the thought. Rory will howl when he hears the tale of Josefina and the American. And at the same time—how well I know the covert twists of his white-boy preppy mind—he’ll find it exciting, a confirmation of his fantasies about the brown girl he married. But that’s another story. Another dance.

The thing is, what happens to Josefina if she stays away from tourist men? I’ve seen a wedding here on the island: a cascade of nylon lace framing the scared face of a fifteen-year-old bride seated with her boy-husband on a pair of straight chairs in the shade of a thatched house on stilts. The fundamentalist preacher thundering about obedience for wives and hellfire for adulterers, while in the background, the wise women of the village flick flies off the macaroni and the iguana stew. After the ceremony come the babies and the work, and the swift shriveling of youth and beauty like sea grapes in the sun.

“Y abajo… Y abajo…”

This song is endless. My partner looks as if he’s about to have a coronary. Certainly it must take special skills to deal with a guy like this—nursing skills, perhaps. I’ve never had an old one, though I’ve been hit on by plenty. “Ils sont tellement gentils,” said the Senegalese massage girl at the hotel in Dakar, telling me about her sixty-year-old French lover, and the other elderly tourists who helped her buy a moped and a condominium. “Quand ils font l’amour, il n y’a pas de problème. C’est vite, vite! Et après il y’a toujours le cadeau.” Practical words from an eminently pragmatic mademoiselle. Mitch, our friend who left the States to become a vacation realtor and beach bum, says that a few girls have escaped from the island to become hostesses in a high-end nightclub and brothel in Antigua. Where they earn a fortune. And when they come home to visit, he reports in an aggrieved tone, they go out dancing dressed up like princesses. And if the wrong man tries to cozy up to them, they look him in the eye and say: I choose my partners.

The music is winding down now, and so is this pointless joke. I’m sweatier than ever and feel not mischievous but strangely melancholy. Weighted, as if I’d swallowed a piece of pig iron. Any minute now, my partner will ask Josefina if she wants a Coke or a beer. And I need to get away, to remember that I’m on vacation. To go drink rum with Rory, to make him jealous by dancing outrageously with some beautiful island boy. Or better yet, to steal off by myself. I’ll shove through the roistering throng on the stairs to reach the upper deck, where stars and planets