Bliss (24 page)

“Can you tell me where is … Hermitage?”

“On the mountain?”

“Car-rental place? Maybe? Hotel?”

“You are at Hermitage Transport right now.”

“Are you Ben?”

“I’m Benjamin. So you did call and reserve.”

“Édouard gave me your name.”

The password finally uttered, Benjamin laughed. “Eddie is my brother-in-law. What he promise with my name?”

“Nothing, really. He just gave it to me.”

Benjamin took a drag from his cigarette, dropped it, and pressed his sandaled foot over it. “Well then,” he said. “I guess that means you can ask of me anything.”

“A car?”

“There are no cars. I don’t lie. If I had one I would provide. It’s my business.”

Eva’s phone rang.

From out of sight, Dart yelled, “Don’t answer it.”

“It’s Eva,” she said into the phone.

“Where are you? Tell me Dart’s with you.”

“Yeah, Sun. He is.”

“What’s going on?” Sun was as nosy as she was worried. “He’s all right? Eva, you know Dart is supposed to be on … his stuff, and he stopped taking it, and … you see how he’s been acting. Not crazy, but like—” Sun paused. “Where
are
you?”

Eva glanced around. Fishing boats with rods outsticking like hairpins, up-pointing like steeples. Every beige catamaran and blue dinghy with a number-stamped hull, every
Pure Visions
and
Kokanee
and
Carpe Diem
noosed by soaking lines but still nodding smugly with the secret of its ability to float.

“On the Out Islands,” Eva said, like she could be on six hundred of them at the same time.

“That’s what it’s called? They have a spa? I should come there?”

“For what? We’re fine.”

Benjamin lit another cigarette.

“I knew you’d be good for him right now. After he told me he got that bracelet and everything, acting like he’d gotten you a square-cut diamond. It was so important to him and I was worried, but then I saw you had it on, but you were talking about Ron, so I just didn’t know.”

Yeah, yeah, whatever
. “Where are
you
?”

“At the airport, about to fly to Miami. Went to the gospel brunch.” Sunny added the last like a spoonful of honey.

“With who?” The question was in regards to all three statements.

There was a short pause. “Vic and Swan are with me,” Sunny said. “Hawk’s talking about getting on our flight. And Myra. Piper’s coming down, to meet us at South Beach, to help me out, since Dart’s … away.”

Eva was silent.

“Ask, Eva. Ask.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Ron’s got a bungalow, at the Delano. And some guy from the Heat’s got both penthouses, having some supposed-to-be-chill parties or whatever. So—”

“I gotta go,” Eva said. She thought of the Delano with its airy lobby and billowing drapes. Thought of its back courtyard with the rows of coiffed palms and the chess set with pieces the size of boot boxes next to fluffy daybeds on a lawn so green and tight you could bowl balls on it straight into the pale blue pool. Eva thought of the Delano, and she wanted to be there with people she could predict. In a lofty duplex bungalow with a flagrant view of the Atlantic and a mini-bar with Glenfiddich and Perrier and Orangina and Famous Amos. The hotel suddenly held for her all the tenderness of an adored home. “Car’s coming to pick me up,” Eva said sharply. “I’m out.”

Benjamin smiled a bit to himself.

“Just gonna stay in Miami for a day or two, Eva. And don’t go getting mad at Piper. She loves you. You and Dart come, to the Delano. Tell me now, so we can get suites big enough—”

“I’ll call you.” Eva pressed OFF.
So Piper’s crying to Sunny, now
.

“Who was it?” Dart sidled up. He was disheveled and damp, as usual. And like he’d been walking through shrubbery. Standing next to Benjamin, who was neat and cool in the ninety-degree heat, Dart was anxious, and seemed, as he could sometime, half-embarrassed to be alive.

“Just work,” Eva said. “I turned it off.” Suddenly she was tired and hungry. A breeze came up, fluttered the skirts in the distance, and cleared for the moment the smog from Eva’s head. She leaned her head against the cottage and closed her eyes. Thought of hotel room after hotel room, and Ron Lil’ John in each one.

“You want a ride, you two?”

“Yes,
please
,” Eva said. She looked at Benjamin like he’d offered up Dart’s cure. “To anywhere.”

C
at Island, from what Eva could tell was shaped like a curved Band-Aid.

There were a half-dozen homegrown hotels, mostly clusters of tidy cottages. The Greenwood, and the Bridge Inn (both NO VACANCY), whose cottages were appointed with periwinkle columns, in no way qualified for the enormity of experience “resort” implied. Cat was all but untouched by commercialism or development.

Eva had no idea where they were going. Dart lolled in the backseat, dropping in and out of sleep. She kept turning to check on him, felt like his head might bounce too hard against the car window. As they rode along the main way in Benjamin’s air-conditioned four-door, Eva saw a few intent people on bikes, but not a soul walking or driving.

Water here’s so blue it looks chemically created, like a melted tropical Bomb Pop they sell off ice cream trucks in Manhattan
.

Benjamin turned onto a narrow unpaved road. There were stone bungalows with thatched roofs. People sat talking on porches. Motor scooters leaned against yellow walls and whitewashed outdoor ovens. Gray satellite dishes mushroomed along Benjamin’s route, huge and familiar and big enough, Eva thought, to sleep in.

Benjamin stopped at a house that would be considered small in most U.S. cities, but next to the others, it loomed like a manor. Dart scrambled from the backseat. In front of the big house with the shingled roof, Eva got out as Benjamin did. There was an asphalt path leading to the front door. The knocker was a marlin green with patina. In the near distance, blue-green sea lapped pink sand. Eva saw a smaller house off to the left. Clothes hung heavily there on a line.

“A nice place,” Benjamin said, and he could have been talking about either house or both of them, or Cat Island itself.

“Real nice,” Eva said. “And quiet.”
Damn near the sound of silence
.

Dart walked to the front door and opened it without touching the marlin. Eva caught Benjamin’s almost imperceptible frown, but she was too tired to apologize. They followed Dart in.

“How much is it?” Dart asked, like he was paying. He dropped his pack on the couch. The room was plainly furnished, and immaculate.

To Eva, Benjamin said, “Come see the patio.”

Once outside, Dart bounded off to the shore. The patio was the same beige stone of the house. There was a lounge, a small table, and a few chairs. Brown-and-white striped cushions neatly stacked under a plank shelter.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m sorry. It’s Eva.”

“You’re from?”

“All over. But from the U.S.”

“Yes, Eva, I guessed that.”

The sun was setting. Eva looked at the unnaturally blue stretch of surf. Dart, with his shirt still on, walked purposefully out into the water, deeper and deeper.
He’s fine. He’s a grown man. Been around the damn world
. Dart’s discordant self was rubbing off on her, though. She felt inadequate and muzzy.

“He’s not your husband.”

“No.”

“Your boyfriend.”

“Kind of,” Eva said. And then she didn’t like the casual way it sounded. She didn’t want to be on a blasé encounter. Not on Cat Island, where Édouard’s brother-in-law was being so gracious and comfortingly brusque. “I’m—”

“My wife and I,” Benjamin said, “take care of this property. That’s our house—” he waved toward the clothesline. “You can stay here tonight. No one is expected. Then tomorrow, when you and…”

“Dart,” Eva said.

“—have rested, we’ll see about a car. You can find a good place on Fernandez, or in Bight.”

Wherever that is
. “You’re sure?” Eva was relieved as Benjamin nodded. “Thank you.” The sun raged, the sky hot plum as Benjamin’s shirt. His rounded forehead was lustrous enough in the light to make him seem wise, and his hair sat back on his head like a yarmulke. The Delano’s blowy, sterile ambience seemed second-rate to her suddenly, and remote.

“Keep things neat,” he said bluntly. “My wife will bring you something by. Her name is Audrey. Call me Ben.”

“I can’t put you through any more trouble.”

“No trouble.”

“You must like Édouard,” Eva said, clumsily falling back on her wide, flirty smile.

“Eddie is Audrey’s brother. I told you.” Benjamin showed Eva the linens, and the restroom, and then left her.

In the first room she saw with a bed, Eva plugged in her cell phone and then lay down on the bare mattress. Tired as she was, she couldn’t sleep.

She looked at the bracelet both Ron and Dart had given her, and her mind went straight to late 1977.
A banner year for pop music
.

Eva was in seventh heaven. Right outside Carmel, California, in a snug living room that doubled as Eva’s bedroom. Her family lived in a rented caretaker’s bungalow behind an estate inhabited only during
the summer. Eva’d never seen the owners, but liked them for providing such an excellent stereo. At eleven years old, Eva was slim as a Siamese cat. Dark hair parted down the middle and pulled into a severe ponytail, she was in jeans and Kinney tennis shoes and a
Good Times
T-shirt. She wore, as was her habit, a tangle of self-braided yarn and lanyard bracelets and flea-market bangles on both wrists.

Because her parents moved a lot, and what was breakable, broke, her parents held onto only a few Stevie Wonder albums, some other Motown artists, and some jazz vocalists. Eva was a radio junkie. By holding her cassette recorder next to the speaker in the living room, she could tape all her faves. At eleven, there was much to be fascinated by—what had before sounded like grown folks’ pleading conversations, or like
tinkle-ring-snap
for her to bounce around to in the car, now sounded big and pure and directed toward her. The Jackson 5’s 1970
ABC
’was the only album Eva considered “hers,” and as “ABC” was the song the album was named for, she figured it to be the most important, and had begun to listen to it endlessly for all the bells and the rises and the short silent spaces, for Jackie’s part, Jermaine’s part, and Michael’s main part. All the boy’s voices fit the other’s perfectly, like rushing liquid puzzle pieces.

Ow!
Eva shivered to Michael’s ad libs and to drums gone for a second and then drums back in a rush. Thrilled by the Jacksons’ urgency and rhyme, Eva was wowed to find out from her mother that “do-re-me” were musical notes, and that there was a song from a movie (titled, perfectly, Eva thought,
The Sound of Music)
called “Do-Re-Mi.” Everything came together—
Me, a name I call myself
was woven tightly in Eva’s mind to Michael’s breathtaking
Come on come on come on lemme show you what it’s all about
.

Whenever she was near a radio, Eva listened to the stories in and about songs, searched for meanings and connections between them. In the evenings, when Eva’s homework was done and her parents were tense or out or one of them was alone in the bedroom with
Little House on the Prairie
on blast, she twisted open a three-pack of fresh, blank TDK (high bias!) ninety-minute tapes. And on the ruled, folded slip TDK provided, Eva neatly penned the song titles and artists
and other pertinent info (culled mostly from disc jockeys, her mother’s
Ebony
, her father’s
Rolling Stone
, and her own
Right On!)
. Eva even taped index cards to the folded slip, so as to have more room for her own liner notes. By writing and rereading the info, Eva felt organized and thorough, and like she could get a better handle on why a song made her feel happy, or sad, or like dancing. Eva lived for the feeling of music, but had a taste for the art and science of it as well.

With her GE cassette recorder/player (black with a wood veneer) aligned perpendicular to the speaker (it was the best way, Eva’d found, after experimenting), and sitting so she could press the record and play buttons, as well as reach the volume and tuner on the receiver, Eva silently cursed the radio DJ for talking over the first bars of the Emotions’ “Best of My Love.” The beginning notes of the song—all zip and anticipation—was what Eva had been angling to get on tape for weeks. Eva loved the Emotions for their straightforward name, and for the romance of gospel siblings Wanda, Sheila, and Jeanette, previously known as the Sunbeams, fighting their way to the Top Forty with selfless aid from the valiant Maurice White, leader of her heroes, Earth, Wind & Fire.

Eva turned the dial with precision, knowing exactly the distance between her desired stations, looking for her song. Eva could tell by looking at the amount of tape left on the cassette that there was just enough room on Side B for “Best of My Love.” This tape was crucial, and almost done. A perfect collage, Eva thought, of how people felt about life and love in 1977.