Bliss (28 page)

Absently, Dart picked up pineapple with his fingers.

“First,” Audrey told him, “that’s what forks are for. Second, it’s Eddie’s day, and we’ll eat when he starts.”

At that, Eddie packed a plate, and a line formed behind him. After Jeeter got his food, and music was playing low and steady, and the patio was bright with moonbeams and chitchat and heart-to-hearts and complaint, Jeeter started talking, in the way spry old men do, about the trials of his day.

“Mister Bethel over to the ‘ouse, carping as usual.”

“For bloody’s sake,” said Benjamin. “And what did he have to say?”

“The normal,” Jeeter said. “Stomach problems,
and
his sadness, and his stress, and his indecision about the big island.”

Dart stopped eating to listen with what had become his usual fascination with anything Cat Island.

“And what did you tell him?” Audrey said, setting out fried grouper and more chicken. “That we all have those problems? That he should be glad his aren’t worse than that?”

“Gave him the doctor’s name in Nassau,” Jeeter said. He spoke haltingly, but only because he was eating. He bundled animal bones on a strip of napkin. “Told him to kill two birds with one stone. To get the heartburn taken care of, and to stay for a few days, fill out the applications, see if he could stay, even if he wanted to.”

“Bethel is undone,” Benjamin said.

“Copying everyone else all the time, one day the monkey cut his throat.”

“Ha!”

Jeeter continued eating. To the side of his plate sat chicken ribs like doused paper matches and bendy needles of fish bone. He tied them in a thin strip of napkin. In the quirk of a methodical man, Dart saw the gestures of a magus. Jeeter scooped the last of his rice with a plastic spoon as Dart minded the old man’s marred hands and odds and ends. Monkey throats and a full moon, murdered birds, fish spines, hearts afire, and blood and stone. Eva could see it in Dart’s open face. He was in the presence of wizardry and aching for a spell.

“You don’t have to speak in code around me,” Dart said.

Jeeter held his spoon in midair. “Pardon me?”

“It’s okay,” Dart said. “I see, and I understand.”

Audrey looked at Eva, who looked at Dart and hated to look at him.

“Play some better music, Eddie,” Benjamin said. “Play it louder.”

Dart touched the bundle of bones. Then he took it from Jeeter’s plate. It was a small, quick action, a theft as unusual as if he’d yanked a strand of hair from Jeeter’s head.

It was Eva’s turn to be transfixed.

Jeeter pulled back. “You want that?”

Like the bones were glowing, Dart dropped them back on Jeeter’s plate.

Eva was grateful when more people came up the walk, wishing Eddie good luck with good cheer. Soft-cheeked women with short hair crisped yellow blond by peroxide. A graying couple both with honey-colored teeth carried a large painting of lobsters and serpents and birds and palms. They presented it to Édouard with shy pride. Eva was full of souse, and had a glass of red punch with nary a kick in it. There was laughter, and the occasional introduction that Eva participated in. People inquired about her leg, offered to get her water or punch or more food. A short man with knobby biceps that stretched a T stamped with IT’S BETTER IN THE BAHAMAS smelled like sand and sea and held Eva’s hand until she pulled it back. His eyes were still in a squint from his day.

Dart had made a pallet of his knees at Jeeter’s feet, and though Eva couldn’t hear a word that passed between them, she could see that Dart was plying the man with questions and that the man was patiently talking to him.

Who knows if Jeeter has answers? Who can answer Dart, anyway?

Jenny shimmied before the birthday boy. She had what looked like a true cocktail, and Édouard bounced like a grizzly might to “Now That We Found Love (What Are We Gonna Do with It?).” Not Third World’s classic and much-maligned 1978 version, which itself was a remake of the O’Jays 1973 original depth charge, a gift also bestowed by songwriters Gamble and Huff in 1977 on Martha Reeves—but the hectic 1992 gold cut from the Overweight Lover, Heavy D. The jam lit a candle in Édouard’s birthday heart.
Spread your wings/So we can fly around the world/Harmony, charm of me/Your fingertips are callin’ me
. The song went faster, faster. Faster. Faster. It was an eternal question—
Now that we found love, what are we going to do with it?—
with no answer, so people keep recording it and recording it, making Gamble and Huff rightfully richer and making Dart feel it, right along with Édouard and Jenny and the others who started bouncing, bouncing, dipping on beat, dipping deeper in the pauses,
smiling, happy. Eva watching, watching, she liked the song, couldn’t help thinking of it in historical terms, even as she was far away from where that kind of stuff mattered most. It was the way she’d come to think of music all the time:
who produced it, when they produced it, what the promo budget was, if it could be sampled or what sample was that and how much it cost to get it cleared, how the airplay was going was the song or the album gonna go platinum first week out
—but here it was, “Now That We Found Love,” an
old
-ass song, written by two hardheaded brothers named Kenny (Gamble) and Leon (Huff) back in 1973—Picasso dying, Vietnam cease-firing, Nixon re-upping, OPEC embargoing—when they were putting together an album called
Ship Ahoy
for the O’Jays, a group whose lack of inhibition Boyz II Men could only aspire to, an album for which the title song was a reflection on the Middle Passage, an album no one thought would go over, but ended up being, along with
So Full of Love
, the O’Jays’ pinnacle. And here the song was. On Cat Island in 1998.
Here it is. Here it is. And Heavy is ripping it
.

The patio, the birthday night,
so full of love
.

Heavy ripping it right up until the next song, which was one of Sunny’s with a whole different beat under it, and bells around it and chimes above it, and Dart stood and searched for Eva’s eyes and she looked at him to say,
Right? It sounds good, huh?
and no more than that, but Dart began to dance, and then to jog slowly around the room, but on beat so it seemed, if you wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, like he was dancing, but if you really looked, he was getting revved, winding himself up or being wound up for something feral. And Eva thought, her not knowing how mania works, that clearly he was about to do something maniacal. When Dart’s head snapped toward Jeeter, who faced his palms to the ceiling and pumped them
up, up
, like an old man trying to hang at a young man’s party which is what he was, Dart, who’d been mouthing the words to Sunny’s song, began to add sound to his mouthing, to his movement, the circular motion that had to be his soul, manifest.

Dart got louder. To where he stopped moving, and in the doorway of Audrey’s tiny kitchen began singing in his booming voice, and
in voices he never used. The main one was like his sister’s—saltant, strong, surely stronger than hers. There was no showmanship from him save vocal richness. But everyone stopped, of course, because he was singing, eyes open and unfocused, and some people looked at him with fear, like he might be crazy; others looked on with sorrow, with curiosity, like he must be in terrible pain. Dart had been damp as usual, and now sweat covered his face, it dripped from his fingertips, and spit was like milk in his mouth, but he kept singing the song as remixed by Édouard to speed up just then, to match, to buss the frantic beats per minute of Heavy’s groove, and Dart stayed with it, his words completely different from Sun’s record lyrics, but his sister still suddenly on the island, breaking up the party with him, freaking it.

Eva was feeling it, too. She wanted to dance to the happiness Édouard put in the beats, the pounces of sound, the pauses, the rings and snaps and slaps, the tremblings of tambourines, and Dart kept singing, singing, chanting now, he was moving again, his jog faster, and just when Eva thought he might drop to his knees because his body had loosened—his hands looked weighted, shoulders low like a boxer’s—he did. Eva didn’t know if it was tears or sweat or both coming down his face, and though they didn’t know her, people looked to Eva because they at least knew Eva and Dart were together, at the Rowe House. They assumed that Dart was Eva’s man. So Eva got up on her tingly weak leg and walked toward him, scared and half-embarrassed as she was, but Édouard, kindly, put an arm out to block her. Then Jenny held Eva steady as she reflexively took the weight off her hurt leg.

Dart began to tweak and wrench. Eva hoped hard that it was real, that he was really crazy or being taken over by something, because if he was faking this she would hate him for having made her believe in him, even if it was just for a moment. She got to her knees gingerly, lifted Dart’s head to the bed of her closed thighs. She could smell the scent of the herb he took rising from his pores. The dried apricot smell repelled her as she held him so his head couldn’t slide down.

I hope
, she thought,
he feels me
.

Close as she was, Eva could see Dart’s tears distinct from his all-day, everyday glaze of sweat. He was still warbling in his sister-tongue, but the words were sporadic. He was blubbering, and the words that escaped were confessions or apologies or promises or requests or regrets or entreaties or maybe all of them, and isn’t that what lyrics were, anyway? Eva and Dart were on the floor by Jeeter with his mangled tips. Dart’s eyes opened. He looked at Jeeter but grabbed the wrist Eva had over his chest with both his hands.

Jeeter wiped Dart’s forehead with the torn yellow paper napkin. Dart looked at the napkin like it was a talisman, like he was being mopped with holy cloth. Dart lay there until Édouard sat him up. And when Jeeter handed Dart the napkin, instead of drying the rest of his face, Dart folded it, tightly and with intense attention, into a tiny, thick square. Some people stayed to watch Eva’s experiment with hope, some walked closer to the shore whispering, some laughing among themselves.

Sunny’s song had faded to the bossiness of the S.O.S. Band’s 1981 “Take Your Time (Do It Right),” and then 1990 Ice Cube
(I don’t bang/I write the good rhymes)
. All the songs were golden charms from other eras. Eva felt uncomfortable with the nostalgia. It had been thrust upon her. She wanted to toss it off, claim it too tight, too big, or, most important, not her style. It clung, though, to every curve of her consciousness. However itchy, it fit. And the sensation led her to think that she would not only get used to it, but that she’d find it comforting and eventually comfortable. Eva didn’t feel old as much as she felt grown. She felt she’d been a part of something larger than herself and that now it was time to take on something her own size. Dart placed the napkin die in his breast pocket. Eva’d folded paper like that. She knew what it meant to take something that was so big and make it as small and hard and crucial as a crucifix.

Édouard helped Dart to his feet. Dart looked to Eva like she was his savior.

A rush of feeling made Eva woozy.

When her eyes opened, she was on the floor, lost in time. To faint is to die a little, and Eva wondered as people fanned her, as two
women helped her to Audrey’s couch, as the music stuck in a scratch on Eddie’s CD, she wondered if she had died and woken on Cat, decided that whether she was in heaven or hell, guided by God or by idols, she would do her best to be worthy of the place, to be glad for what she’d created in her life on earth. At the thought of creation she remembered. That’s how fainting is—you come back and you have to remember who you are and what your circumstances are. She sat still, knowing she would never forget or be forgiven, knowing that her last chance and her biggest fear were living and breathing inside her. Audrey brought her cold cherry punch, and Eva was as grateful as she’d ever been for anything. The drink seemed thick and sweet and like ice so cold as not to be found anyplace in the Bahamas. It hurt her teeth and coated her stomach and shocked her brain. Eva was going to follow her baby’s lead. She gulped Audrey’s gift like it was a potion.

Her leg hurt like a vise was being closed on it, but Eva put her hand on her belly and felt unshackled in a way she hadn’t since her first visit to her first clinic. She felt worthy of assistance, which had the immediate affect of her wanting to assist someone else, and to get off Cat Island, and to partner up with Dart. It was the kind of thought that usually made her run for the hills, but now it gave her a purpose.

He needs me
.

And so Eva’s mind began to click—no old lyrics or album release dates—just
click-click-click
.

I’m about to make moves, and for him to make moves with me, I gotta get his mind right
.

“W
e’re okay, Édouard,” Eva said. “He’s fine.”

Jeeter said, “Audrey, maybe get him some of the strong punch.”

“Dart doesn’t drink.”

“What does he do, then?” Audrey said.

“He has me.”

Édouard helped Dart to his feet.

“Eddie!” Dart said. “Eva and I wish you the HAPPIEST of birthdays. Eva, who has taken this RISK with me. Beautiful, sweet EVA who is my LOVE.

Eva was mortified by his certainty, but reveled in his pride and directness. Dart’s cadence was thrillingly valedictory—he’d shown them who he was and was bidding all a proud, emotional good night.

“We should get back,” Eva said calmly. She was dizzy. “I’m tired.”

“IS it the BABY?” It was as if Dart’s ears were plugged. He spoke clearly and loudly, but was out of sync. Audrey and Édouard looked at Eva.

“YEAH,” Eva said, loud as Dart, and with a smile. “It is.” Eva told a roomful of people of a pregnancy.
I’ve been pregnant before, but this is the first time I’m going to have a baby. Whatever craziness is with Dart, it’s not his fault
. He knew about the baby, and not only was he not running, he was standing up for her. So she’d stand up for him.

“Let’s get you HOME,” Dart said with a puffed-up affection Eva almost curled up in.