Mitla Pass (15 page)

In the next few days I made friends with the Dumonts and their five children, who had their own home a short distance away. They spoke French with a sprinkling of English and we worked out a palatable language. Pierre was Junkyard’s man on St. Barths, so to speak.

We jeeped every road on the island in the next few days. It was a speck of a place, a volcanic rock of about eight square miles. Leaping and bounding hills, cliffs, and rockfalls were ribboned by a few dozen kilometers of road, some of cement, some of volcanic rock, and some of washboard dirt. Tire busters, one and all. It was a roller coaster with a few flat stretches here and there with potholes—I hesitate to call them potholes, as they were large enough to make the jeep almost vanish.

A dozen Lilliputian bays were serene on the leeward side and inclined to violence on the windward. Warm water rolled or bashed up onto the most magnificent beaches of wheatfield-colored off-white sands. St. Barths was not what you would call a garden spot, but the ash was rich and there were many wild runs of bougainvillea wrapping around scrub trees and smatterings of wild-flower cover. No turn in any direction was without understated beauty.

There was little fertile land and it was easy to see that the islanders had to struggle to maintain a marginal existence.

Gustavia, a pearl of a little harbor, housed a waterfront quay and a half-dozen dirt streets. Most of the island’s fifteen hundred population lived around there. The Select Bar on the quay was the central watering hole.

St. Barths proved to be an anachronism for this part of the world. Because she was so tiny, one by six miles, no sugar plantation ever rooted there and thus the island never had slaves. The inhabitants were mostly of French ancestry from Normandy and Brittany. It seemed more of a misplaced parcel of France. Some of the older women still wore Amish-like bonnets and long black skirts and the men dressed in seafaring blue.

St. Barths had some beef cattle, a smattering of vegetable and fruit plots and, of course, the bountiful sea. There was intense trade with a radius of neighboring islands. One got the idea quickly that black market, white market, and free market were the key to existence. Junkyard had a small warehouse in Gustavia. It lacked very little.

Some wealthy French had found St. Barths. Yachtsmen had wandered on it. There were a few dozen small villas in spellbinding cliffside locations, including a half dozen belonging to Americans. One is always leery of being an outsider and crashing their solitude. I needn’t have worried. “Junkyard” was the magic name. He had shipped in most of the building materials for the homes erected since the war. Because it was a place where every outsider came looking for the same thing, friendships formed easily, and the islanders were just about the nicest people I had ever met.

Life was unencumbered with the problems, values, and intricacies of modern civilization. There was some electricity, always unreliable, of the home generator variety. One school, one doctor. Otherwise there were no telephones, waterworks, or sewers.

Directly below Villa Murphy, St. Jean’s beach was split in half by an enormous boulder of lava that ran out to the sea. On this outcropping, built on several levels, was the single hotel, the Eden Rock, consisting of five rooms. I befriended the owner, a flier named Remy de Haenen who had pioneered the airstrip. His wife, like Denise Dumont and most of the women, was a superb chef, making little miracles of meals with the lean pickings from the fields.

Otherwise there was a lot of beach to meditate on, a lot of sunsets to watch, a lot of conversation at the Select Bar. I don’t know if anyone ever called me by my name. I was simply “the writer.”

How utterly strange the way things turned out. I came girded for battle, to scale or bash down walls of fear I had erected all my life. When I opened my eyes on St. Barths, the walls simply vanished. Instead, St. Barths opened its arms wide and caressed me and told me, “Take off your pack and stand at ease, Marine, and be afraid no more.”

I learned to shut out of my mind anything that distracted me from my work. I could go for days without remembering Penny and Roxy. This was my fear, remembering. It was a revelation that I had the capacity to forget.

This was what I came to find. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was, one day, going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world, the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity, stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That’s the bloody price. I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it’s part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love, you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three- or four-year period.

I learned this barefoot on a screened-in veranda on Villa Murphy. Nothing on this planet existed but the words I was putting on paper. I didn’t even exist. I had no needs but food and sleep. I had no reason to live, except to create by writing.

I ran the beach at sunup, thinking, talking to myself as I ran.

“Hey, writer, how’s it go?”

I’d wave and keep running.

I would talk out my next day’s work to myself watching the sunset. And when the sun went down I drank hard. Once in a while the words wouldn’t come. I’d take a day off and Pierre and I went fishing and he taught me to sail.

Sometimes loneliness would strike like the suddenness of the lightning storms. I would not permit the pain to overtake me.

Things were starting to happen now that I had longed might happen when I was a little boy. When the electricity failed, I wrote by candlelight. When a hurricane wrecked part of the villa, I wrote from a room at the Eden Rock. I had reached a level of obsession, consummation—not of this planet. I wrote when I had fever. I wrote with hangovers. I wrote when some damned fine-looking women came prowling around.

I had envisioned St. Barths as a hell island where I had to serve a sentence. Instead of imprisoning me, it liberated me in so many ways. I had learned that when you have accomplished, without fear, an ability to go far, far, far inside yourself, relive the emotional starvation and lovelessness from parents during childhood, you have come to know a certain awesome splendor. Without it, you cannot reach for eternity as a writer. Paying your dues to attain it becomes so frightening, so gut-wrenching, it guarantees you years of sleeplessness and nightmares. I had to find it or never hope again.

Every so often Tex dropped in in his stupid little Dutch STOL. For a time I expected divorce papers, but they never came. I filled my letters to the girls with happiness. One day I gave Tex the first draft screenplay to send to Schlosberg, and then I dared to start thinking about a novel.

Christmas was coming and so were Penny and Roxy. Tex flew me over to St. Thomas to fetch them. With my screenplay on Judd Schlosberg’s desk, I allowed myself to become excited, to reenter the world. St. Barths wasn’t forever, but I wanted my girls to know the place.

We worked out St. Thomas as a rendezvous because Val’s family had a number of retired Navy friends there who could keep the girls till I arrived. We radioed ahead to get them packed and down to the airport.

I was totally unprepared to see Val when we landed. I thought she would fly part of the way but expected she would vacation in Jamaica, which she loved as a girl.

After an uproarious hello from the girls, Tex showed them around the plane and I went aside with Val. We shook hands and then I kissed her cheek. She didn’t resist, or show any hostility. I hadn’t thought of her much. I hadn’t let myself. I had known my guilt was stuffed down and would erupt, but not till after I’d won my tussle with the screenplay.

Maybe she was expecting me to look like a bearded, rum-soaked beachcomber. I was really tan and fit.

“You look great,” she said.

“Not much to do except stay healthy or go to seed. I ... look—I didn’t expect to see you, Val. Let me catch my breath.”

“Sure. How’s the work coming?”

“I turned in the first draft screenplay a few weeks ago. I should be hearing soon. Sometimes it’s tough to get a message to me. Where are you heading, anyhow?”

“I’m staying on St. Thomas. Mom is going to join me in a few days.”

“Roxy wrote that she had a stroke. How is she doing?”

“Not too badly. This will be her first trip. She’s having a little trouble with—never mind.”

“Well, you give her my love, will you?”

“Sure.”

“Any special instructions about the girls?”

“No. They’re dying to be with you. They’ve missed their dad.”

“I’ve got a good time planned. I have a record player that works most of the time. I plan to run them through an opera and a symphony a day and I’ve got a half-dozen books I want to read to them. Really hit it lucky. I’m not working right now so we’ll do a lot of beaching and bust open lobsters. Don’t laugh but I even sail a little.”

“You? Sail? I’ll bet you’re good.”

“I’m terrible. So, there’s a lot of kids their age. Everyone seems to get along with the language problem. They’ll have a good time.”

I became a little uneasy and looked over to Tex. He gave me a high sign, “Anytime you’re ready, boss.”

“We’ll be back on Friday, the second. I’ll try to radio ahead and let you know.”

“Oh, I meant to tell you. No scuba diving for Penny. She can snorkel but the doctor said he didn’t want any pressure on her head.”

“Yeah ... well, pleasant surprise seeing you. Have yourself a happy holiday and ... look ... would you be interested in taking a hop over and seeing how the other half lives? Tex will run you back when your mom arrives.”

“I’d love to come over,” she whispered.

“Better get in touch with the people you’re staying with ...”

“I mentioned to them and to Mom that there was a chance in a thousand I might wind up in St. Barths. It’s fine with her.”

“Well, then let’s go get you a bag packed. You don’t need much.”

“It’s already packed. It’s in the terminal. Gideon, we’re going to be able to ... ”

I put my arms about her and held her.

F
ROM THE FIRST MOMENT
at St. Barths, my love affair with the island had started. I had pushed myself, beyond myself, out to a supernova called writer’s isolation. But for me, a horny little Jew, no place can be paradise without a woman. Now, it was paradise. The island conquered my girls as it had conquered me.

“Where on earth did you find this record, Gideon?”

“In a back closet, all covered with dust.”

“Seventy-eight RPM’s ... holy cow.”

“It’s the latest thing on St. Barths.”

We danced on the veranda, so tightly.

I saw you last night,

And got that old feeling,

When you came in sight,

I got that old feeling,

The moment you passed by,

I felt a thrill,

And when you caught my eye,

My heart stood still,

Once again I seemed to feel

That old yearning,

And I knew the spark of love,

Was still burning
...

“Hey, Marine, you’re moving in a little fast.”

“That’s me, baby. Stick with me. I’ll take you over the rough spots.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Zadok, Gideon Zadok, and I’m going to be a great writer someday.”

With all the beauty and magic around us, there was still terrible unhealed pain between Val and me. We didn’t talk about it much, but it was there. When people have inflicted such hurt on each other for so long a time, there must be scar tissue and bad dreams that will never go away. Were we strong enough, did we have the capability of love so powerful that we could endure black memories of the past, tuck them into a remote corner and never let them haunt us again? Could Val and I make it to the end? The moment I saw her, I knew I wanted to try.

Tex returned in a week with the message that Judd Schlosberg had lined up radio time to speak to me on Guadeloupe. The big island, which administrated St. Barths, was a hundred miles or so to the south and was more in touch with the outside world.

We could easily round-trip it in a day and it would be fun for the girls. Basse Terre had a bazaar to drive them crazy. I went to the shortwave radio center at the central post office.

Oh, my, my, my! Those exquisite words. “We love the script. We want to do the picture.”

Schlosberg wanted a few weeks of changes, nothing major. Could I get back after New Year’s?

“I’ll be there.”

End of transmission.

I was halfway home! Now, I dared dream openly of the novel.

O
N THE WESTERN
end of St. Barths, Mount Vitet rose a thousand feet above the sea. Sometimes the jeep won the battle up the road, sometimes the road won. We had to climb the last half hour. We were both weary from welcoming in the New Year with a party for two.

The expanse of water below us held a scattering of islands, little volcanic wonderments blasting up from the seabed millions of years ago.

Val perched on a rock and crossed her legs and threw her head back to catch the breeze. The sweat shone off her face and neck and bosom. I unbuttoned her blouse.

“God, they taste good sweaty.”

She held my head to her. “You crazy. I’m so happy we’re all going back together.”

“Me too,” I said.

“You’ll miss this place, Gideon.”

“I was lucky to find it. God forbid I never come back. I was lucky. I’d like to freeze time now, here. Val, you’re beautiful.”

“Shucks, man, you’re going to make me cry.”

You can make love to a hundred women, but no one feels like the woman who gave you your children.