Bliss (34 page)

Eva didn’t hear from Ron until she’d been back in New York for
over a month. He suggested she meet him in Midtown, at yet another hotel room.

“It’s what we do,” he said, when she’d suggested her apartment. So Eva left her office, met him at his room, and without much more than a “Hey” and a “Hey,” Eva and Ron did their thing. They had sex, awash in whiskey, and it was as good as it had ever been. Eva, though, had faint bruises inside her thighs from where he pressed his fingers. Ron had bite marks on his chest, and Eva had scratched red welts over his neck and back. Laden as forensic traces, wisps of Eva’s hair lay on the white sheets. Strands of it wound through the rings on Ron’s right hand.

He made a point of telling Eva he was in town for four more days. “Call me,” he said as tritely as he was able, “if you need anything.”

She didn’t call.

A few months later they were both in Reno for the International DJ Festival and neither called the other. They ran into each other at a showcase, made allusions to “complicated situations” and “crazy, needy” artists. Ron and Eva clinked glasses and kept moving.

When Eva was back in Los Angeles, for the Trix video shoot, and for a meeting about a possible new promotion, she had also a meeting in Ron’s building, so she made her way by his office. They left together, and there was dinner before the sex back at the Peninsula in Eva’s Grand Deluxe Suite. Twelve hundred square feet, marble bathroom with oversize tub, complimentary fruit basket, VCR, and bedside electronic panel to control the fan, lighting, and valet call buttons. Even at the Peninsula, in the Grand Deluxe Suite, they didn’t discuss the last time they’d been there together in her lesser Grand Deluxe room. And they never—not in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, or 1997—discussed the abortion.

Instead, they kissed and licked like there was no sugar sweeter. Eva began to scratch through to blood. He pushed into her from behind until she jerked away, cursing and teasing. Eva and Ron didn’t drive-by fuck. Good at each other’s bodies, they settled in for opera. Eva and Ron were the most themselves with each other in bed, excavating psyches until their souls scraped.

Always they inched to their corners after, exhausted, haltingly angry and satisfied. They dozed twitchily, each wanting to be the first awake and gone. They’d move toward the bed’s center, comforted by the other’s regular rasps and moist smells. Ron and Eva pressed and pawed each other unconsciously and affectionately. They nursed muddled blues.

Cat Island

G
oats sniffed at conch shells and waded through Audrey’s starfish crop. The sand seemed more pink than usual to Eva. It was as if red coals were buried beneath. From her frying hollow on the beach, Eva smelled fish in burning butter. It made her nauseous. Audrey walked onto the sand, offering a short glass of amber liquid.

Scotch?
Eva hoped.
I wish
.

Because Eva’d caught a cold, and Pritz could hear it through the phone, and because Eva’d been progressively more evil with Pritz in each call since their first one, Eva had been able to put her off for three days. But the former Giada Biasella was to arrive on Cat Island the next afternoon, and the thought of Pritz squealing “Ciao!” in person made Eva twist a knot into the huge tank she was wearing. It was Dart’s, and it came to her knees. The armholes hung to her waist, and she had a square of green batik thrown over her shins.

The Rowe House was not like the one Eva, Pritz, and two of Pritz’s girlfriends had shared on Montego Bay the winter before. That palace had two stories, four bedrooms, silken sofas, a snooty cook, a thorough housecleaner, and an almond-tree-shaded pool with a view
of the bay. There’d been ginger iced tea, and ackee and saltfish served on china. Star-apple salad and rum cocktails for lunch, and then whatever substances Pritz had hustled in or acquired locally to increase the relaxation level or sexual timbre or to decrease the number of sleep hours needed.

On Cat, though, Eva wasn’t in a jet skiing mood or a shucked-oysters-and-all-night-at-the-casino mood or a girl-talk-with-pseudo-girlfriends mood or a flirt-with-and-maybe-fuck-the-French-business-man-on-holiday mood. On Cat, Eva wanted liquor but wasn’t drinking it. She was sleeping long heavy hours and waking rested, even if stiff and congested and queasy. On Cat, Eva had yet to put on a bathing suit and walk in the ocean. Even with Dart the way he was, and maybe because of it, Eva felt ensconced in the safety and seclusion of the Rowe House and its tiny patio. She was in Gladys Knight’s simpler place and time. The rush of the sea and the fact of her pregnancy was plenty.

She wanted to get back in bed with Dart and suck on some orangey benne cake. Eva wanted to smell Dart’s salty apricot smell, dream about her child. Eva pictured herself and Dart and a faceless baby. Dart on real drugs and not sleeping so much and Benjamin and Audrey and Édouard and even Jenny and the Skip—her family. Eva and Dart and the son would walk on the beach and Dart would swing the child by its arms and there would be embraces and the Rowe House would be brightly lit and well-appointed and the Rowes would never return. Eva believed it was a sweet slice of hell specific to her generation to be wise to the absurdity of Hallmarkian dreams, indeed to feel superior to them—but to still dream them in Technicolor, and with a booming soundtrack. Eva wanted some Scotch with her benne cake.

“Take this,” Audrey said, thrusting a small glass at Eva. She stomped her foot at the goats.

Eva shook her head. “No medicine.” Eva wiped at puffed eyes, and then hacked phlegm into a napkin. She felt like she was imposing herself onto the stinging, flawless day.

“It’s honey,” Audrey said curtly. “Lemon.”

The thought of a coat on her scratchy throat appealed, but Eva had a creepy flash about bees and their digestive enzymes and pregnancy. She believed Audrey’s good intention but said, “No, thanks. Maybe just some lemon water?”

Audrey brought her eyebrows together. “If I wanted to bring you water, that’s what I would have bring. It’s an old tale about honey. Honey is fine for you even now.”

Eva wondered from where she’d heard bad news about honey and pregnancy, and what the full story was. She wondered if girls all their lives attracted random bits of baby info to their brains like pins to a magnet. Eva wondered if she had instinct. Her current one was to lie in the sun and bake the cold from her body. Eva hadn’t taken a thing for her cold except lemon juice in hot water, and her leg bled puss because she hadn’t put on it so much as a dab of antique Neosporin from the Rowe’s bathroom cabinet.

“I guess I can’t complain of you sitting there,” Audrey said, “a bump on a log.” Then she cocked her head toward the Rowe House. “But he needs to get up.”

“He gets up,” Eva said with a cough.

“When I don’t see him. He doesn’t even swim—” Audrey knocked back the honey and lemon herself.

“I told you he has a problem.” Eva scratched her nose and chin. “I can’t explain it to you.” Eva’s skin was burned and peeling on her face, shoulders, chin, and cleavage. Her nose was raw from blowing, and she had the raised bumps of prickly heat inside her elbows. Her hair was brittle. Her finger- and toenails were hard and chipped. Dart was sullen and always sleeping, so she’d been spending every day, almost dawn to dusk, in the rays.

Audrey sat down next to Eva on the sand like it wasn’t sizzling. “If you don’t bring him food to the bed,” she said, “I bet he won’t starve to death.”

Dart wasn’t eating much of what Eva brought him as it was. “Dart’s unhappy in this world,” she said almost proudly. “Ill at ease.”

Audrey was unimpressed. “He’s common. The strife, lies, bias, the sickness. It’s why we’re all the way we are, why it’s hard to bring the
kids into this world. It’s hard to face them. We disappoint.” She gave a snorty laugh.
“Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje
. Giver of blow forgets, bearer of scar remembers. I see the scars on you.”

“Scars?” Eva coughed. Audrey winced. “Please. Don’t go getting all supernatural on me.”

“Supernatural? Ha. Nat-u-ral. Us that have the scars can see them. You see mine.”

Audrey wasn’t speaking in her forged sage voice. She was like her brother, Édouard, for a moment, utterly without fraud. Eva had an urge to loop an arm through Audrey’s but repressed it, felt like she’d be rebuffed, even in what seemed a sudden sisterhood.

“You made a sacrifice in blood, no?” She laughed her stark laugh again. “It’s why you came here with him, the stories they sell in Nassau about Cat? The magic herbs that do the work? Get rid of a baby?”

Eva didn’t want to talk about that. Her karma, she felt, was bad enough. “Dart needs help. For his mania. He wanted a spell. A show, I guess. Something to believe in.”

“
Mania
. I like that word. Like a flower it sounds. So he had his mania. Made his own spell on Eddie’s night? All that foolishness. But for you?”

Eva shrugged.
Be so good to have some Scotch
. She tasted it in her mouth, thinking how nice it would be to have any whiskey when Dart took his herbs with Pepsi or whatever canned juice she’d gotten from the store on her walks with Audrey. He’d pass a few words and then sleep for fifteen hours. Eva sat with Dart in the dusky bedroom during lunchtimes, and sometimes during the evenings. He ignored her, sometimes dismissed her or feigned sleep, or put his head in her lap until he was truly snoring. Then Eva would sit on the patio, or go to Audrey and Benjamin’s to watch one of the mawkish romances Ben enjoyed seeing Audrey struggle not to cry through. Mellowed toward Eva because of her brooding pregnancy, Audrey’s contempt for Dart had hardened when she walked in on Eva feverishly asleep on the Rowe’s narrow couch two mornings before. Eva, for her part, felt effective, and duty-bound.

She let her head fall back, closed her eyes to the sun, and sighed.

“Oh, you are so
complete
. You have everything so much you won’t make one wish. Say right now what would
you
have in this world so unfit for your precious man?”

Eva looked Audrey in her face. “For everything to be even and fair and pure.” Eva pushed down the snot in her throat.

“You come to … Cat … for—” Audrey sputtered. “This is where it’s …
fair
and
pure
?” She looked like she wanted to spit on Eva and her free time and faraway home to go to. “You
like
your
everything
, anyway,
for you
.”

“I never would’ve been here, except—”

“Except what?” Audrey had no time for wishy-washiness.

“Except Dart needs somebody.” Eva wiped at her raw nose. “If it was me going crazy, he’d stay.”
Of course he would
.

“You are going crazy.” Audrey gestured forcefully toward Eva’s waist, then her leg, and then her face. “And Dart is where? We’re all sad, Eva. Dart makes a life of it while the rest of us work.” Audrey rose and took the few steps to check her vibrant, drying cloth.

“It’s chemical with him, Audrey.” Eva was pleading a case, not even sure it was hers to plead. “Physical! Not laziness.”

“There’s medicine for this sickness?”

“Yes.” Eva was weary as Audrey hit her with Eva’s own argument. “He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t take it. He takes herbs.” She thought the last would speak to Audrey’s sage-y sensibilities, but it didn’t.

“Ah,” she said from the trodden path to the back of her house. “He has
you
for his medicine. I saw it from when you got here.”

Eva didn’t know why Dart’s mood had turned. She didn’t know if he was faking or not. She didn’t know, even if he was faking it, if he didn’t deserve her support. It had come out of the blue—Dart’s cloud, and Eva’s cold. But Eva’s fever was breaking.

She gathered her things and went to the Rowe House, where Dart was silent behind a closed bedroom door. For the first time since she’d been on Cat, she picked up the house phone and was surprised and glad to hear a dial tone.

Eva got a U.S. operator and called depression hotlines in Manhattan. She tried six different numbers—all were in various states of
not answering, or voice mail, or some other nonhuman, unresponsive bullshit. Eva ended up calling an 800 number for the Betty Ford Center, and a nice woman spoke to her for twenty minutes. The woman told her right away that Betty Ford didn’t treat manic depression unless it was related to alcoholism, but recommended some books, and said that Dart did seem like he was going through something that he should talk to someone about. Eva got sleepy talking on the phone to the woman, who finally asked her how she was dealing with it.

“Not that well,” Eva said.

She thought about all the Scotch she’d had, even knowing she was pregnant. But the Scotch had to do with Future Baby, Eva thought, and with Ron, and so Dart was not to blame for any of it. The Betty Ford woman talked about “intervention,” which Eva wondered if she had the energy for. In the end, the woman sounded so absolutely sure of Dart’s manic depression, Eva started to question whether she’d seen symptoms in Dart at all.

Eva went to the bedroom. Dart appeared to be asleep. She showered and then doctored some dried-out aloe vera gel and rubbed it into her peeling skin and lips. She searched for the first time since she’d been on Cat for mascara and shimmering lip gloss. The wound on her leg looked better, but still it throbbed as Eva rubbed coconut oil through her hair and looked without success for a cute, clean outfit. Dart didn’t stir. Eva sat on the bed, touched his cool shoulder. A sheet was wrapped around him precisely from armpit to toe. He looked ready to be laid in a sarcophagus.