Bliss (17 page)

“So a week then,” Eva said. “I’ll call—”

“Everything’s not what it seems,
mi chica pequeña
. Everything’s not what it looks like from where you are.”

“It’ll look right from where I’m ‘bout to go.”

“And where’s that? Tell me so I can meet you in this place where everything looks all right. You’ve been on the road too long.”

“What road?” Sebastian said “road” like it was a turbulent, mythical place where people forgot the destination of their original journey. It irritated Eva, though, because she felt he might be right. “I’m working. That’s why you’re jerking me?”

“How are you speaking? To me.”

“That’s why I’m taking the week,” Eva said dryly. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

“
Usted debe saber lo que usted hace
.” Sebastian’s way of being strict with Eva was to get personal. His code for being personal was to be condescending in Spanish. To speak with her as he had in crisp hotel beds, on midnight flights. Sebastian knew Eva respected money being made, lived for the show going on. He valued that. He also knew how Eva’s face contorted when she had an orgasm, and nursed the scorn some men have for that flattering, fleeting, unreliable image. Sebastian wanted Eva back in the office so he could see how she stood, what she wore, how she spoke and breathed and reacted to unpleasant news. His want for her back in New York had to do with Sunny’s momentum. It also had to do with Eva’s will and how Sebastian liked for her to fly only as far and for as long as he let her.

You better know what you’re doing
, he’d said.

Eva was familiar with how Sebastian’s lilt could slice through gut to spine. She didn’t miss a beat.

“
Si lo voya saber, señor
,” Eva said in her best southwestern Español. Sebastian used to like to hear her Spanish when he lost it, surrendered, sleepily mumbled, “Feed me,” sucked her breasts. “
Usted puede creer eso.”

Oh, I will know what I’m doing. Sir. Soon. You can believe that
.

She pressed OFF with Sebastian, and pressed ON as Ron’s number came up on her screen.

“Where you at?” he said.

“Right here.” As if he could know where that was.

“Why aren’t you at his brunch? If I gotta be here, I know you do.”

“I’m not—”

“You’re not coming down here? Why?” Harsh as he sounded, Ron wasn’t pissed. He was curious.

“I’m getting out of here.” Eva sounded uncertain.

“What’s that mean? To New York? What happened? Seb pull your leash?”

“Not New York. Dude, I’m getting off the phone.” Eva was exasperated, light-headed. Her leash hadn’t been pulled. Her collar had been tightened. Since Showcase Savoir Faire, her collar had been tighter and tighter.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ron said. “Seemed like something was wrong with you last night.”

“Where’d you get the bracelet you gave me?” Eva worked to not yell at him. She’d stayed on her game with Sebastian, though, and it had worn her out.

“Why you so concerned with that bracelet? You got Sun down here with nothing but a stylist. Myra’s wondering where you are. I found it. Found the damn bracelet and knew it was some gypsy shit you’d actually like. I found it on a doorknob.”

“So that’s what I am. If it don’t cost a grip, I don’t want it. I’m fake like that.”

“Listen to me. Jesus! I’m saying the
opposite
.”

“You’re not saying shit.”

“Why you so … emotional? You on your period?” He paused. “You pregnant?”

“I’m not emotional.” She didn’t sound emotional. She could chew through his furniture, though. Shit in his shoes.

“You’re pregnant. You’re pregnant. It’s in your voice.” He paused. “Not by me, I know.”

Eva continued tersely. It was the same transparent tone she’d
used with Piper. “Why’d you act like you got it for me, like it was something—”

“Say you’re not pregnant. You can’t. Goddamn.”

“I’m not pregnant.” Weakly like she was lying to an officer of an important court. Slowly, like her reply would determine whether she got the needle.

“You’re a liar,” he snapped out. “By the way you said it. You running to get it taken care of?” Before she could answer, Ron switched to cajoling. “You can’t come down here, represent, behind this? Or call room service, tell ‘em to bring you some Pepto or something, some tea. I’ll come up.”

Represent what? Represent who? What is this voice he has on right now? “I
gotta go,” she said.

“Who’s gonna go with you?” he said, back to snapping. “Ain’t like you got no real girls. Maybe Sun? Or you’re gonna round up Giada?”

“I’m cool, Ron.”

“I know.” He did think Eva was “cool” about most things. It was what made him want her when he wanted her, and dodge her when he dodged her. “What you want me to tell people? They’re asking for you here. You’re sick?”

“As far as anyone is concerned,” Eva said, “you haven’t talked to me.”
You haven’t talked to me
.

“You’re taking punk Dart with you. That’s what it is.”

“Actually,” she said in her very regular Eva voice, “he’s taking me with him.”

Dead air
. From his side.

What’s changed?

Did I know a little bit?

Yesterday?

They should make it hurt more. It should cause a year of concentrated physical and psychological pain. People can’t be counted on to have regret. So maybe this is payback
.

It was the kind of posttraumatic arrest Eva had never believed in. The kind of crisis she’d leaped over. But now Eva didn’t know if she’d
been tough all along, or if the abortions had made her tough. She did know, though, that she wasn’t as tough as she or Ron or Dart or Sunny thought she was. And she wasn’t as tough, anymore, as she needed to be. A mass was encroaching. Cold shame. Weakness. Fear. Her collar wasn’t tight enough to kill her, but it was tight enough to remind her what life is. She fought it. She used discipline, and steered her mind.

It’s time to go
.

Eva roused herself by thinking she’d made Ron angry enough to hang up the phone in her face. She roused herself further by thinking of the glorious sunsets and sunrises there’d be on Dart’s Out Islands. She reached into what she considered the normal part of her brain, glad, after dealing with Dart, for the ability. She thought that wherever Cat Island was, there’d be a chance for peace for the both of them. And for her, in sad moments, there’d be the thin-skinned berry pout of Dart’s bottom lip.

See it ain’t nothin’ wrong with
dreamin’/Boy don’t get me wrong
.

—“N
EXT
L
IFETIME
,”

words and music by Erykah Badu

T
he man’s voice called out, quizzing tardy messengers on the status of deliveries. Syllables soared, dove, Haitian style.
Words as birds
. The vessel bobbed heavily with crates of flour and fruit, canned milk, mail and vegetables.

“Édouard, miss,” he said, holding out a huge, hard hand to Eva as she stepped onboard. “Here for you.” Édouard’s voice was luxuriant and ceremonial.

“I’m Eva,” she said, trying to match him in tone and inflection. “Nice boat.”

Giant intestines haphazardly stuffed with warm lumpy fat—that’s what Édouard’s upper arms were like. He reminded Eva of huge brothers from Philly, and Brooklyn and West L.A, too. Nearsighted nerds with ill nicknames. Cats wearing Vans and slouching like skaters. Boys who wrote twisted, iron-fisted rhymes. Boys with no muscle tone, who intimidated with their weirdness, their bulk, or on the strength, on the
fact
of their blackness alone. This amused and angered them, sent them to arty white girls or beatnik black or brown girls for compassion, and then back to their clubrooms to get blunted and beery, to peruse deliciously sick comics, brutal graphic novels, and the newest porn.

Édouard’s eyes avoided her body. She warmed to him in the faintly formal fashion he’d initiated.

Hypocrites always want to make it seem like good intent/Never want to face it when it’s time for punishment
. Lauryn Hill leaked from Édouard’s headphones, a totally different drum line under the lyrics, and some high-pitched bells. Hill was cursing a former lover, but it sounded to Eva like Hill was cursing her. So Eva concentrated on the boom-boom beneath the words, abstractions she could qualify and quantify in terms of work.
This Édouard probably cut the mix himself

Dart clomped on board behind her and dramatically lost his balance as immediately as Eva found hers. She sat down on a bench along the low rail. On the boat was just her, Dart, the skipper, who looked like Paul Winfield in
Sounder
, and Édouard.

Dart sat his pack down next to Eva. “This is aft,” Dart said, “I’m going fore.”

“I’m just gonna sit here,” Eva said. Thinking she was sitting at the stern of the red-hulled workboat, and he was going to the bow. She’d lived right off the Pacific, had been on her share of boats big and small.

“There’s some food in the zip pocket,” Dart said, “if you’re hungry.” Then he stomped up front with awkward enthusiasm.

As soon as he said it, Eva was starved. She reached in through damp folds, found waxed paper wrapped around a piece of bread hard enough to be days old. She bit into the twist of sourdough, slipped feet from her sandals, placed them on the deck.
Hot. Warm wet wood under soles
. Eva gnawed as the boat with its peeling cabin chugged out to sea.

They hadn’t been out fifteen minutes when she saw Dart’s long arms gesticulating passionately, crowding the cabin’s doorway. Édouard moved his bulk gracefully away from him.

“Miss Eva.” Édouard peeled a green apple with a small curved knife. Handle like a polished pinkie bone. “Your friend. He should relax.” On the thumb of the hand with the knife was a gob of peanut butter.

“What’s he saying?”

“Let him tell you. Skip’s patience is wearing. You have people on Cat? Friends?”

“No. Dart just wants to go.”

Édouard nodded his head, sliced a crescent from the now creamy apple, neatly bit peanut butter from his thumb. “Have a good time, then. Get your sun and your relaxation. He’s not your husband. He’s still looking.”

Eva’d rarely thought of being Dart’s wife or girlfriend, but the thought of him “still looking” narrowed her eyes.

“Your friend wants a remedy. A key,” Édouard snorted, “to an enchanted door.”

“You have those on Cat?” Eva liked referring to the island as he did, like she knew about it.

“No. And so your … Bart?”

“D’Artagnan, actually.”

Édouard opened his mouth around a mocking, titanic laugh. “He’ll be mad when he gets there.”

And if you don’t change then the rain soon come
… More Lauryn Hill leaking. Then the Temptations, something from before Norman Whitfield starting producing the group. A song from the Tempts’ early, pretty era.

Édouard licked the last butter from his hand, and then pushed his teeth into the now egg-shaped apple. Slid headphones back to his ears, attended to some ropy business past the cabin. Eva let her eyes climb a ladder of clouds.

That morning, she and Dart had walked through the lobby of the Royal Towers, Eva glancing around like a fugitive, though anyone they knew was either asleep or at the gospel brunch, where hair-of-the-dog was free and flowing. They stepped from the conditioned air of the hotel into heat unframed by a view of the sea, heat unreflected by bluish oval pools. Sunlight slapped the ground like long curse, and Eva baked sorely for the first time since arriving in the Bahamas. She palmed $10 on a doorman. Checked her bag for her passport as sweat rolled from her armpit to her waist.

Pimpy as Billy Dee’s Louis MacKay as Fishburne’s Bumpy in
The Cotton Club
, a doorman installed Eva and Dart in a gleaming gray 1980 Monte Carlo, a cab driven by a perfectly pleated woman who
looked like she was on her way from church, looked like Pearl Bailey ready for three choruses of “If They Could See Me Now,” looked like her hat was where her pin money had gone, and like whatever she’d spent had been worth it.

Without a dot of sweat on him in the heat, the doorman gave a little salute, a hard hint at his brow saying,
I’m down for whatever
, and at the second of Eva’s realization that the doorman was the bartender of the coco water, and the gardener of the acrid can, Dart made a booming request to be taken “INTO NASSAU, PLEASE,” and the Pearl woman cruised, one hand on her wheel, over the new bridge from Paradise Island, then along a two-lane road lined with short buildings, sherbet-colored houses and shacks selling legal advice or sardines ‘n’ grits or hairstyles.

This place is like an extension of Miami
.

They passed half-built minimalls, the British Colonial Hilton, Esso and Texaco gas stations, a McDonald’s, a Hertz Rent-A-Car, and any number of conch spots. A fort with shiny black cannons. Scrubbed, cornrowed kids with fake Louis Vuitton backpacks. Everywhere the passenger cars were small and newish, the Mack trucks huge and churning cement for the new hotels and new time-share communities, everywhere there were signs for Pepsi, Heineken, and Kalik Gold. As advised by a barrage of municipal signs, Eva put on her seat belt.