Voyager: Travel Writings (9 page)

The second day on St. Kitts we rented equipment for scuba at the Fisherman’s Wharf in Basseterre and learned basic diving in Banana Bay. Another day, we chartered a sailboat and crossed the seven-mile channel to St. Eustatius, one of the most lovely and least developed of the Dutch Antilles, for a day and a night. There we climbed through orchids to the Quill, an eighteen-hundred-foot-high extinct volcano, and later visited Fort Oranje, where the American flag got its first foreign salute in 1776. The following morning, we sailed back to St. Kitts and strolled along the narrow streets in and around Independence Square in Basseterre, where eighteenth-century Georgian houses had been renovated and turned into artists’ studios and boutiques. Later, we were back at Rawlins Plantation, sitting on the veranda, dressed for dinner, aperitifs in hand, for all the world looking and acting like Chase’s elegant globe-trotting grandparents in the 1920s and not at all like who we were, a middle-aged, middle-class pair of professors gone a-courting in the 1980s. Actually, Chase was only thirty-eight then; at forty-eight, I was middle-aged. We listened to the chortle of ground doves and the quiet click of sugarcane in the evening breeze as the sun set at the edge of a sky gone to gray velvet streaked with plum, the sea a flattened pink-and-cobalt plain. For a few hours we believed that we had never been this contented in our lives.

Maybe it was Chase, maybe it was me, I can’t recall now, but one of us popped our blissful Caribbean bubble and brought me
back around to the subject of my second marriage and its turbulent end. I know it sounds absurd, I told her, but on some level I truly believed that by marrying Christine I could somehow shuck the guilty weight of having married Darlene. I thought it would nullify the first marriage in a way that a divorce couldn’t. I hoped it would nullify the divorce, too—although I had no idea at the time that it was merely the first of what would eventually be three. And the abandonment of my child. That, too. It all—marriage, divorce, abandonment—felt like a serial crime to me. And marrying again was supposed to expunge my criminal record—just as my marriage to Darlene had been unconsciously designed to expunge my parents’ record. The sad truth is that I would not have married Christine at twenty-two if I had not married Darlene at nineteen and divorced her and abandoned our child at twenty. So, yes, although I didn’t know it at the time, or was only vaguely aware of it, my two early marriages were profoundly, if not causally, connected.

Otherwise, there was too much against me and Christine to marry. Our youth, for starters. Even though in the early 1960s men and women married at a much younger age than now, Christine and I each had a lot of unfinished business that would be harder for us to finish as a married couple—like college in her case and some sort of profession (back then she said she wanted to be an actress), and everything else in mine. I had no college degree and was barely employed, after all, with no imaginable way to provide for Christine in the style to which she was not only accustomed but was sure she deserved as well. Her father and uncle owned and ran a large pharmaceutical business, and the family on her father’s side by any standard was rich and had been for generations; my family had been working-class poor even longer, and, after my father’s departure, poverty stricken. Also, well before meeting me in person, having only heard about me from Christine, her parents, especially her father, hated and mistrusted me. Her mother less so, maybe, but enough to say that she’d be relieved if Christine left me for another boy, and she had a few suggestions.

They had learned of my first marriage and fatherhood and divorce by hiring a private detective who dug it out for them and then sprang their discovery on Christine, home from college during spring break. She quickly disappointed them by telling them that they’d wasted their money, because she had known about it from the start. Which was true. I had told Christine the whole sad story, at least as much of it as I knew and understood at the time, the first night we were together, making out passionately in the backseat of her roommate’s boyfriend’s Thunderbird on an after-party, alcohol-fueled, overnight trip from Boston to Vermont. To my surprise, my confession seemed to give me, in her eyes, a certain mystery and gravitas. Christine whispered that she’d never been fucked by a divorced man before. I assumed that meant that as soon as we got back from Vermont and went to her apartment or mine, she would want me to fuck her. And she did, and I did. So I was glad I had told her the truth about Darlene and Leona.

Her parents not only distrusted me, they were also afraid of me, especially her father—rightly, perhaps, but not for the reasons they gave. This is Christine’s imitation in bed in Boston of her father speaking on the phone from the brick Colonial family home in Richmond in his long-voweled Tidewater drawl:
Christine, the young man is not Jewish. Doesn’t have to be Jewish, you understand. But it’d help a whole lot if you and he had a similar background. A college dropout who claims to be a writer, but he hasn’t published anything yet, has he? Maybe never will. Not that I hold it against a young fellow who wants to become a successful writer, you understand. But it might help the boy’s prospects some if he got himself a college degree or two. And a reliable source of income. How do you know the boy isn’t some kind of gold digger, anyhow? His father is a plumber or something like that in New Hampshire. An alcoholic. Abandoned the family years ago, you said. I feel sorry for the boy, naturally. And the mother, too. The mother, she’s a kind of clerk or something out in California? And the boy, all he does for a living is wash dishes
part-time in a restaurant? Or house-paint? Wasn’t that in the private investigator’s report? Honey, it just sounds like he sees you as an opportunity, his golden calf. Don’t laugh. If he were Jewish I wouldn’t think it. But a poor Gentile wouldn’t likely be all that attracted to a Jewish girl in the first place if it wasn’t for her family’s money . . .

Except for the business about my early marriage, fatherhood, and divorce, which she was still trying to process into a bawdy narrative, Christine had told him all of it herself, volunteering the information as a way to make her new Yankee boyfriend’s family background, literary ambitions, even his poverty, exotic and scary to her parents and her older sister and brother and her ten-years-younger sister. It worked on her siblings all right, but so far was wasted on her parents. It was part of the process of turning her new boyfriend gradually into a story, as she did with her family members themselves, as she did with practically everyone she knew, first by objectifying them, then by appropriating their personal, sometimes private and secret stories and taking possession of them, finally telling and retelling the stories with increasing elaboration and verve and clever impersonations, exaggerating and embellishing the stories until they were inimitable, so that only Christine herself could tell them. For example, only she could reveal to her new boyfriend the length, girth, and other distinguishing characteristics of her previous boyfriends’ penises and do it in a way that was so broadly comical that the details did not seem quite believable and thus cause her new boyfriend to laugh and not fear that soon she would be regaling strangers with accounts of the length, girth, and distinguishing characteristics of his penis, too.

Her parents’ opposition was unyielding. Unfortunately, most of their worst fears were validated by my behavior, especially after they pulled her out of Emerson College and brought her back to Richmond and got her enrolled for the coming fall at Virginia Commonwealth University. A few weeks later, like a lost dog, I showed up on their doorstep. Within twenty-four hours I had totaled her mother’s brand-new Volvo and got myself tossed into jail for driving without a driver’s license, having loaned it to my underage brother, Steve, so he could buy booze for his air force buddies. Christine’s
father had to bail me out of jail. By the time I went before a judge, Steve had mailed my license back, but I got hit with a two-hundred-dollar fine, most of which I had to borrow from Christine’s father. I talked my way into a job as assistant buyer of fabrics and draperies at Thalheimer’s Department Store downtown, despite knowing nothing about fabrics, draperies, or buying wholesale, by claiming to have attended Harvard for three years; rented an apartment on Monument Avenue; and tried to convince Christine’s parents of my worth and promise, mainly by way of attending with great sincere sensitivity to her mother, who was in psychoanalysis then and, against her better judgment, believed that I was a decent person and was intelligent and possibly talented.

My memory is a little vague on the next sequence of events, but I believe it was around this time that Christine’s parents decided that the best way to get rid of me was to take Christine and her younger sister on a two-month Grand Tour to Paris, London, and Edinburgh, where I couldn’t follow. By the time they returned to Richmond, I had quit my job at Thalheimer’s, decamped for Boston, rented an apartment on Symphony Road again, and got a part-time job as a basement stockboy in the bookstore in Brookline that half a century later would become the Booksmith, where Joker showed up at my reading. Christine talked her parents into letting her return to Emerson for her senior year, and we soon resumed our love affair there, although by then we had both given up trying to convince her parents to do more than merely tolerate my existence on the same planet with them and their middle daughter.

A year later, I was working in New Hampshire as a plumber, Christine was back in Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth and sleeping with at least two young men that I knew of, and at the same time exchanging passionate, sexually explicit love letters with me and making long, painful, weeping telephone calls in which we declared our desperate, undying love for each other. Until I couldn’t take the intensity and unsettledness anymore and said what I thought was my last and permanent good-bye. Within a day of my
having said good-bye, she came knocking at the door of my third-floor flat in Concord, New Hampshire.

So we eloped. Well, not really—Christine eloped. I stayed put. I was a plumber who had to go to work the next day.

From St. Kitts, Chase and I moved south and slowly curled back toward the west. The link between the Leewards and the Windwards—either the last of one or the first of the other—was Montserrat, a two-flight Leeward Islands Air Transport hop from St. Kitts by way of Antigua. Back then, before the 1995 and 1997 volcanic eruptions in the Soufrière Hills destroyed the capital, Plymouth, and made more than half the island uninhabitable and caused widespread evacuations, Montserrat was a tiny, seldom-visited British crown colony located halfway between St. Kitts–Nevis and Guadeloupe. Settled in 1632 by Irish Catholics fleeing persecution over on neighboring St. Kitts, it was a lonely forty-square-mile dot, mountainous, verdant, and winsome.

With only a few brown-gray beaches, and those practically inaccessible, and but a handful of small hotels, the island had remained free to pursue matters other than tourism—mainly agriculture (limes, vegetables, and sea island cotton) and, surprisingly, recording studios, such as the George Martin–run Montserrat AIR Studios, which had brought to the island a relatively large number of international recording stars, who, when there, were all business. Montserrat was not a secret waiting to be told. It was simply unable to support tourism and, wisely, had long refused to try. We duly noted this and respectfully moved on down the archipelago.

From the air, the large French island of Guadeloupe looks like a bright green butterfly. In fact, it is two very dissimilar, geologically distinct, wing-shaped islands, Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre, separated by a narrow seawater channel and connected by a mere drawbridge. Grande-Terre, to the east, is formed of coral and is flat
and ringed by pink and white beaches; Basse-Terre, the western half, is volcanic and mountainous, covered with rain forest, and capped by its own La Soufrière, a forty-eight-hundred-foot smoldering volcano.

Guadeloupe is the spot in the Lesser Antilles where two long geological arcs intersect. One arc, that of the Late Cretaceous coral shelf, starts way to the southeast at Barbados, emerging from the sea at nearby Marie-Galante and again here in Guadeloupe at Grande-Terre and in the north at Barbuda, Anguilla, and Anegada. This type of island is low, windswept, usually dry, and surrounded by white beaches, reefs, and old shipwrecks. The second arc, that of the Miocene volcanic islands, is slightly to the west of the first and runs from Grenada northward to Dominica and on to the Basse-Terre wing of the Guadeloupan butterfly, where it curves slowly, passes through St. Kitts–Nevis and Antigua, and goes on to Tortola, Virgin Gorda, and the U.S. Virgins. This type of island is mountainous, moist, and heavily forested, with fewer, sometimes brown or even black sand beaches and many deepwater ports. This second arc of islands lies over a subduction zone—where the American Plate, situated beneath the Atlantic Ocean, grinds against and is shoved downward by the Caribbean Plate—and is one of the most geologically active parts of the earth’s crust. Thus the frequency of those devastating earthquakes and constantly smoldering volcanoes.

Most visitors to Guadeloupe see only the Grande-Terre half of the island, where the airport, the congested city of Pointe-à-Pitre, the long white beaches, and the resort hotels are located. But the most remarkable thing about Guadeloupe was to be found on the other side of the drawbridge, on Basse-Terre, and that was the 74,100-acre Parc Naturel, which is where we headed. Guadeloupe is large, 530 square miles, but even so, the Parc Naturel constitutes a significant set-aside of public lands. The island’s population, however, was growing rapidly and spreading out from Pointe-à-Pitre into the lush foothills of Basse-Terre, and one could foresee a coming shift
in priorities, when this enormous rain forest preserve would seem a luxury. An island can support only so many people, and then it begins to eat itself.

But if one wanted to get away from it all (and was not interested in mountain climbing in Basse-Terre), there were several tiny island dependencies off Guadeloupe that could be reached by ferry from Pointe-à-Pitre and the village of Trois-Rivières, where we found nearly empty beaches, fishing villages, a guesthouse or two, and better food than one might expect. Closest were the Îles des Saintes, eight islets settled by Breton and Norman fishermen and boatbuilders. A little farther on was Marie-Galante, which was larger and had a population of nearly eight thousand and a town, Grand-Bourg, with several seaside cafés and bistros and a handful of small hotels. It was a miniature, countrified version of St. Bart’s. Services were minimal and it was difficult to get to, but this is where the most seasoned travelers to Guadeloupe holed up, especially those who, like us, were seeking privacy and calm.