February Heat. Wilson Roberts
the motor, leaned out the window and spoke without smiling. “Thought you were closing a big policy deal.” She was clipping sentences like her old Yankee father.
A bad sign.
“Fell through. Found out this morning.” I out-clipped her.
Shaking her head she switched from Yankee to the condescending psycho-talk common in nearby Northampton with its plethora of shrinks, social workers, academics and their clients, students and hangers-on. “On one level I can really appreciate how hard you work around here, but it seems to me you should be out working another deal instead of wearing bib overalls and playing in the woods.”
“It relaxes me.” I smiled.
She didn’t return it. “That’s your trouble. You relax too much. You didn’t relax so much you’d be a vice-president of the company with a suite of offices in Hartford. Not just a field rep.” Yankee again. In spades.
Melinda had just been offered the presidency of a small, very exclusive woman’s college in Upstate New York. She saw it as a stepping-stone to the headwaters of Smith, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke or Radcliff. She didn’t need a husband who wasn’t a boardroom hot shot, suave and well connected.
Hell, she didn’t need any kind of husband for a trek toward stardom among the Seven Sister Colleges, as evidenced by her setting up housekeeping within weeks of our divorce with a lovely and wealthy blonde Smith senior. With a little work and a lot of drinking, I convinced myself that it was an easier situation to deal with than if she’d run off with another man.
We got divorced. Sold the farm. Fought over custody of the dog, Rumble. I got Rumble. She got rid of me.
Our sons were grown and no problem. Tim, the youngest, was a third year law student at Penn. The older two, Frank and Chris, were partners in a successful New Orleans real estate firm. They inherited Lin’s drive, but got just about as far from her Yankee ways as the country allows.
Financially, after the divorce, I was all set, with my half of the proceeds on the farm, plus our savings and stock portfolio. But I was at loose ends. With no idea of what to do, I rented an apartment in Springfield and played around at selling insurance for another six months, hating every minute of it. Then Tim quit law school to play with a Red Sox farm team.
That was the final straw for me. My marriage was over. Frank and Chris were doing well, making lots of money and enjoying their lives. Tim had become a boy of summer. And I was living in an apartment in Springfield, Massachusetts, not exactly one of the world’s garden spots, selling insurance, writing poetry that no one wanted to publish, and occasionally playing my guitar at open mikes and folk clubs. My life was on hold.
One November Wednesday, more than usually disgruntled, I looked at my life in Springfield. Everything was out of control. I was lonely, depressed and overwhelmed by world and personal events, when I remembered what a friend had told me about his vacation on St. Ursula.
“It’s the most manageable place I’ve ever been,” he said. “It’s got a government pattered after the British system, but it’s only thirty-two square miles and there are less than twelve thousand people in the whole country.”
After a week of thinking about his descriptions of the small island nation, I decided to change my life. Packing a few clothes and my 1950 Martin guitar, I flew from Bradley International Airport to San Juan where I caught an Ursula Air hop to St. Ursula. After three weeks of looking around I bought an old stone West Indian house on an acre and a half plot of ground and spent the next year fixing it up. Buying the house and its repairs took a big bite out of my savings, but with care and a little work on the side, the interest on the balance keeps me in beer and food.
Paradise. At least it might look that way to most outsiders, but the island isn’t an easy place for an American expatriate to live. Aside from the economic opportunities they present, Ursulines don’t care much for people who were not born there. Statesiders and Brits are especially suspect; the Brits because of the legacy of colonialism, statesiders because of how we have despoiled the American islands. As a result I have to watch myself, being careful to keep my place, which requires a maintaining very low profile. For me it’s worth such care to live in a micro world. One where there are a lot of givens and few unknowns.
And here I am. In my fifties, bald, in good health, both physically, mentally and sexually, I’m retired and living alone on an island in a corner of the Caribbean where drunks, drifters, and assorted losers exist on the periphery of an economy geared to providing several weeks of rest and recreation to affluent Canadians, Americans and Brits.
IT WAS DARK when The Yellow Bird pulled into the West End of St. Ursula. The dock was empty, with the exception of a few taxi drivers, the kids who handle the boat’s lines, and my friend Chance, parked outside the customs building, waving as I gathered my bags of mail, the few purchases I had made in St. Thomas, and headed for the ladder to the lower deck.
The woman in the batik sundress was there first. She didn’t have any luggage, just a large cotton purse slung over her shoulder and a small duffle bag.
“Do me a favor,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. Some people can say ‘do me a favor’ making it sound like they’re doing you one by asking. She made it look like a favor too.
Too many of the men I know go nuts over young women and girls. Most single men my age on St. Ursula act like hopeless jerks, grinning at bikinis as they run around wearing earrings with gold medallions or vasectomy symbols hanging from gold chains nestling in the graying hair on their chests, their arms and calves adorned with tattoos.
Me, I like women. I enjoy their company. I like sitting for long hours swapping life stories. If it leads to sexual comfort that’s just dandy with me, but if it doesn’t there’s no big deal. The talking, laughing, and exchanging opinions are what are important. For those exchanges to mean much I need a partner a good distance from her twenties.
She was nearly five nine, as tall as I am, green eyes slightly crinkled at the corners with sun born good humored crow’s feet. Tanned, muscular, she looked as though she could swim five or six miles without pause. I liked the way she looked, her voice, the forthrightness of her “Do me a favor.”
“Sure. What is it?” I said, surprised at her approaching me. Women rarely do. I don’t appear to be the hero type. I look like the man in the Panama hat; the one who should be dressed in a white linen suit, sitting on a rattan chair drinking foul concoctions, fanning my sweat, plotting the hero’s destruction, cigar ash falling on my tie, burning little holes in my shirt. I’m not like that, of course. I am the hero type. An aging Clark Kent without the silly underwear, as one woman called me after I rescued her daughter and son from pirates who had taken their sailboat and held them for ransom on a small island not far from St. Ursula.
“When we go through customs, let me carry one of your bags. And tell them I’m with you. Please.”
TWO
CHANCE AND RUMBLE waited in his rusted blue Land Rover as we came out of Customs and Immigration. A large man, six five and a half and weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, his thick black hair fell nearly to his eyes, shaggy over his neck, with a well-trimmed van dyke on his chin. Barefoot, with rings on each toe, he wore a brown cotton vest and a worn, weathered yellow bathing suit. Rumble sat wriggling on his lap, tongue out, watching as I approached them.
“Thanks.” The woman smiled, offering me her hand as we stood on the side of the road, beyond hearing range of Ursuline officials, her single small duffle bag sitting on the pavement. “I hope I didn’t inconvenience you, I just thought I’d have an easier time getting through immigration if I was with someone who looked as though he knew his way around.”
“Don’t say goodbye yet.” I took her arm, leading her to the Land Rover. “The immigration officials can still see us and they might think it’s a bit peculiar if we come in like friends and part like strangers. Come on, Chance will give us both a ride. I’m Frank James, this is Chance.” I pointed to the mountain seated behind the wheel.