Bunny and Shark (5 page)

You get up and head back towards deck. As you pass into the inside of the boat your foot hits plush. The husband is there in his bathrobe, standing at the threshold of the bedroom. His short grey hair is messy on his head. He blocks your way out, stretching his arms up and then throwing his body down to touch his toes, making a giant growling sound. As he comes up you step out and into the lamplight and just stand there. The husband's face is red and puffy. He rubs his eyes. He isn't sure but he also isn't afraid. You push out your tits and grind your feet firm into the lush carpet.

“What the . . . ?” He throws up his hands, turning his head in both directions as if looking for someone other than you. You cough loudly. Your head lowers just a hint but you avoid looking down at yourself. Then he smiles, puts his hands on his hips, squints at you, as if he is seeing against the limits of his own eyes. Satisfied at having come to some sort of conclusion finally, he shifts his weight from one leg to the other.

“How did you get on my boat?” he asks, easing back onto a chair. Then laughs, as if the question were simply protocol. He calls out amicably to his wife. “Jablonsky?”

Do you stay, or take off? You think you hear the word “unbelievable” muttered under this breath. But he's amused. Your eyes lock, his with a taunting glint, and despite the threat of Jablonsky appearing at any moment, you slowly lower yourself to the floor. The tapes crunch around your bum. The polyester points of the rug tickle your skin. You know, from your Bunny days, that if you put yourself at his feet, so to speak, your chances to manipulate him later are better; that, for a man, a woman getting down lower than him, while holding his eyes, reminds him of the thrilling hint of a blow job. So you fall to your knees. His mouth opens a crack and you see he's caught his breath. He opens his legs an invisible hint and puts his hand towards your head but then doesn't touch you.

Instead, he puts his hands on either side of his head, runs his fingers through his hair. The nails are short and manicured. You stay still. Hold his eyes. This is your only chance. You are a taboo that he is still considering. He hasn't called the crew, no, just Jablonsky. Did she tell him about having seen you in the waters last night?

The carpet seems to give off its own heat, residue from the sunlit day. Now he is looking you up and down, his brow strained, furrowed with pleasure. You wonder if he won't chuckle soon at what you've gotten up to. You recognize him, but just barely; you wish you could remember his name so that you could begin to say something. He holds out his hand. Very suddenly. You don't know what to do. You don't think he means to do this. It's an unconscious impulse. In this small uncertain moment before Jablonsky comes, as the warmth of the night encloses the ship, you reach out one blackened, dirty arm toward him, just to test what another body from your world might do, if it would accept you again. Then you hear the shush of the carpet and the instep of Jablonsky coming near. Your arm lowers a little. He laughs again, his face snaps back to its husband-self, as if to say, I had you there for a second, didn't I? This form of betrayal is so familiar you wince.

“I thought so,” Jablonsky says, and picks up your hand that is still hung there, rejected, and you bathe in the aura of her gardenia perfume. She is dressed in a suit and her hair is combed. She helps you up, leads you to a small eating table, ignores that you're still locked in the husband's unwavering gaze. The husband dismisses you by getting up and following her. His game with you is now over. When she turns, she says your name out loud. Her accent makes it feel foreign, and all you can do is try to grasp at her features now that they are not the black hole anymore, but a mixture of peach-coloured skin pockets and wrinkles, the good kind, and you feel confused when, in the next breath, she repeats this name, yours you suppose, ending with:

“You can't stay here.” And pushes an envelope across the table. Money, you know instantly. And her voice. It was her. Both on the telephone that day on the lowlands, and then again, on the sailboat. You want to run to her. The room is electric, nothing is as it once was.

Her composure is unflinching in the face of the husband, who now, grinning wildly, leans back so you see his belly. You don't trust him. You return to the authority of Jablonsky's seriousness as the dead weight of the boat under you cruises vaguely in the direction of Miami.

“Money,” she says. “And you'll have to get a new identity obviously. You know all about that, I'm sure.” You place both hands on the paper packet, their filthiness against its pristine surface fascinating you. The shapely nails with all those chips – they betray the integrity of name that she had spoken out loud. They are swollen beyond recognition. You see how they are starting to shake as you fold one on top of the other, one on top of the other. A new identity, yes, you see now that that is possible.

“But I don't want to leave the island . . .” Your voice is out of practice. Jablonsky ignores what you say.

“In some remote parts of Florida. I know there are places you could go.”

I don't want to leave, you think.

“What happened to your face, anyhow?” And you remember. Laugh loudly at the ridiculousness of it all. A betrayal so complete it isn't worthy of consideration. How she won't see that all of this is false and that you deserve to be where she sits now all pristine and pricked up? She says your name again, as if trying to placate something growing in you. And you feel your status waning and you want to shred these blasted nails and all this fucking impossible tape, and a great distance widens between you-as-Pierrot and you-as-this-old-name she keeps repeating, as if to ask:

“Are you really there somewhere underneath it all?”

Pretend to swim your way to Florida, you think, to a new life, but really just turn heel once out of sight and come back to your island with the cash.

“No fucking way, Jablonsky.” It comes as a whisper. It may not have been words but just thoughts. You stand up, suddenly furious. You push the envelope back at her. The husband gets up. “Now, now,” he says, putting his arms on you. At first it's an echo of that hand he held out to you like a lover or a friend, but then he is wrapping those short, meaty arms around you. You feel how they are covered in grey hair, there is a certain kind of pressure and anxiety in his touch and then you feel his hands try to touch your tits, furtively so Jablonsky won't notice. You find your own hands under the angles of his arms and untangle yourself from his grasp, backing away.

“Take the money. Please just take it,” says Jablonsky, and you take it from her. She has seen everything. She teeters in what you see are short pumps, half the heel buried.

“We cannot know you anymore. You know that.” You turn to the husband one last time, you are still vulnerable to trusting a man who has taken advantage of you. To turning tricks to gain favours. He stands there flushed, arms benign at his side.

“Run away,” he agrees, then says your name. And you can't stand the sound of that name because it won't let you inhabit its luxuries, so you turn heel, for real now, rushing out into the night where the hard white deck is empty, where a waxing moon lights a path on the ocean.

/ / /

You find a way to lodge the money into your bathing suit. Then swim away, in which direction you have no idea. Just get away from them before you have to kill them for knowing you are alive. As if you could actually to that.

You make fierce breaststrokes, your name on Jablonsky's lips ringing in your ears. The new identity, the one that peach-coloured face seemed so sure was still possible, looms out there before you, in the direction of Florida. But you know you are probably swimming the wrong way.

The island is small. No matter how far you swim out, just like before, you are led back to the original shore. Until you are ready to be fully cast out, you won't be.

Day five dead

(In which Bunny has sex with

the young man.)

Y
OU REACH SHORE
and come up onto the beach, settle yourself into the leafy grasses that grow alongside a line of large rocks that spills out into the sea, smell dryness against the indulgence of car and suntan oils, sickly sweet mango juice and parched, laundered towels.

You scan left towards a bluish mountain lane hooded by palms and acacia, wide enough for a car to drive up. The villas on either side are like small pastel mints of yellow, green and pink, nestled into clusters of trees that rise up towards a smaller mountain whose top is lopped off. At the foot of the lane is a decorative wall and just below it a beach lined with low-rise hotel resorts: open-air cabins selling Ting soda and Presidente beer. There is plenty of wind that morning before the sun takes over and changes how you see everything. For this brief, in-between moment, all edges are crisp and tuned to the sound of a single bird, one perched for several seconds not a foot away from you. To the right is the sea. Way out in the distance a giant cruise ship goes by. Your eyes move gradually from sea back to shore, observing mast upon mast of anchored sailboats.

You lay back against the sand, looking up to the palm outspread above you. Something you've looked at a million times, but never really until now. A formidable arch guarding over ever-narrowing white rings that lead to a smooth, green interior bark. At the top, a mass of loose layers of brown peel that bunch up like a shriveled pineapple. The look of it makes you thirsty. And you itch.

You creep closer to the nearest resort and stretch out on one of the lawn chairs before the attendants start to arrive. You rush over to the free-standing showers to rinse your feet with the lower faucet, then briefly rinse your whole body and hair with the vast spray of cold water from the upper shower. You take only seconds to do this and don't really come clean. The risk is to be caught by an attendant, even once. They would recognize you forever afterwards. Before you leave you grab two large, striped towels from under a lawn chair.

Back at your huddling place near the rocks, you make your fingers into a comb to rip through your tangles, then arrange your hair into a stiff nest. Once and for all, you rip the tapes off your body, leaving red welts up and down your arms and legs, wincing in pain as you go. With one of the towels you make a sarong around your body, with the other you fashion a sort of turban around your head. Couldn't you look like you are simply a tourist, an early riser and one of the resort guests? You emerge from the rocks, towel-wrapped, holding the NAUI card and the cash tightly between your boobs.

A desire for the comforts and privileges of your former existence rushes back into you. The desire to be held by a man who objectifies you. To be seen as an icon of the sexualized, available woman. Isn't that what the bastard loved about you? How you knew just when enough was enough, how to extricate yourself when a man was done with you, when he needed his space, how to put yourself at the edge of the bedroom to get dressed again, just out of sight of his ritual smoke. Then give him room, let him be. Make sure that if he did glance your way, you showed him your sweeter angles. Now that the sex was done, your voluptuousness was a hostility he'd like to forget. He wanted innocence afterwards. Until next time. You could get anything from a man when his dick was hard, but after that, you were like a rabbit darting in and out of the game, watching him, waiting to see, not sure if you could believe what he promised.

Trips to the Cayman Islands. Gifts bought on shore. In exchange, you were careful to look like the women from island-boutique ads in glossy magazines, those women parading designer Euro wares that were so glaring in this island world, so exalted – Hermès at the neck of each woman, grotesque Hublots on the wrists of men overnighting from St. Barthes, Perrier Jouet, six bottles down, as usual, at table six.

He adored you, but it was on his terms. And you knew, at all times, that you were also replaceable. Later on he loved you for other reasons: you began to become his equal, to understand how to be his ally. And then he saw your potential to be too equal, to have the power to be his enemy.

“That's right, I figured out your world a little, didn't I? When your belly grew fat I took that as I sign that I could let things slide just a touch too. Cutting my primping to half-time, what else was there to do but try to be on your side? To get in on it. You didn't like that in the end, did you?”

“I love you like this,” he'd said, stroking your track-panted leg on a weekend. Together you'd pour over the real-estate files, the bastard occasionally jumping up to rant and strut around the table full of maps, and you, ever-present audience to his chaotic utterances. What he didn't know was that you were taking notes. Over tumblers of scotch you sorted the touchable from untouchable lands, those that you could rule versus those owned for generations by the blacks. Shanty structures mostly, but in prime locations. Impenetrable for inexplicable reasons. In the family lands there was another order of ring leaders, but not the paper kind. A lack of papers, more like it. Buried or lost for decades.

“We'll get to those parts when we run out of these,” he'd say pointing to the mountainous sea vistas where he held monopoly, his hands moving up from one side of the mountain to the other, then from the paper to your arms to pull you away from where you too were now plotting. Yeah, you loved each other back then. And later on you'd put on your gold, and arrange your hair to fit with his vision of a nymph: tumbling blonde folds draping over all the white folds of your dress. And as usual, the guests would arrive and you'd say mum about the lands. Let him be king. You were becoming more than his prize. You were his partner.

The sun is still just coming in. Your sense of self-entitlement vaguely revived in you, you have no trouble sidling by a lawn chair and stealing a lady's empty beach bag.

The most eager guests are now meandering down to the wading pool for a yoga session. Their voices shatter the air, a confidence that doesn't fit with the fragile, flabby skin they carry as they pad by. As the hip-hop blasts out into the morning air, you spy a guest, who like you, has come onto the beach part of the resort alone. She sits on a lawn chair several metres away. Her nice, even tan and brash, hot-pink lipstick betrays that she is likely not from too far away, maybe from another island. No northerner on holiday. You envy the clingy gold jersey of the dress, how it fits her rather ample body, making her look so good. You take note of the heavy Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses as she removes them, and folds them into the dress which she takes off, stashing it into her bag. You get up then, and pass her so that the sun turns you almost completely into a silhouette. You perceive that she has seen you only as a flash, and that she has determined that you are staff, and therefore black. Or that you are one of the roaming band of outworkers who glide, almost invisibly, from resort to resort, each with a small bag out of which endless treasures cascade, from plants to patterned fabrics to shells to holding your hand and painting your nails right there on the beach. Rarely anything is sold. Then the mass of it gets mysteriously coiled up again into a small bundle before they amble away to the next beach. As she passes you, making her way carelessly down to the water without looking back, you say with the expected accent:

“I know you lady, seen you before, you wan' an aloe vera massage later on, I give you a nice one . . .”

Maybe your voice trails off with one of her arms waving at you, but at first she hardly even notices you, except as a familiar silhouette passing by, one with whom she understands she can trust her belongings. You laugh and say, “Alright, alright, lady, later on. I see you later on.” As you bend down over your tummy rolls you draw in a deep and luxurious sigh, tidying up her striped towel, which the wind has blown sideways off her lawn chair. You pick up her hat and pat it twice so it stays put on top of her striped towel. Then you pick up her bag with that gold dress and YSL glasses rolled up inside of it, place it into the stolen beach bag and sling it over your shoulder like it's your own. As if it were simply full of the aloe vera stalks you carry with you from beach to beach, looking for a white lady to give a massage to.

You wait until night. At a garbage depot you find a plate nearly full of food the dogs haven't smelled out yet. You eat some greasy rice and the good part of a chicken leg, at the same time putting on the gold dress. It's a light-knit Prada and fits snug. The problem now is, you haven't got any shoes. But since food is in your belly this problem feels like something for later, even though your plan was to get moving to the main street by six. With one foot you kick about the overturned garbage at the side of the metal drum. Your fingers comb upwards into the mass of blonde, arms feeling light because you've lost weight. So many times in front of a mirror making this same twist at the back with a prominent bouffant at the front. You're doing it, eyes closed, when your foot hits a flip-flop. It's hot-pink and pretty dirty but you figure there must be a mate. There isn't. You find another set, one with the thong ripped out, but between the three you make a pair. Then you saunter slowly in the direction of the next resort.

If you yourself believe you have a reason to be somewhere, no one will question you. Walk up to the bar, look straight ahead. Anyone who looks at you: hold their eyes and their eyes will meet your defiance and fold with a flicker. How predictable all this is. A glimpse to your hair and your figure now stuffed into the gold Lycra and they are instantly defeated. They see almost nothing else. You pray so.

The bar is at the far end of a pool, flickering under torchlights, candle-lined and curved to face the sea. Casually you dip your hand into the stringent aqua waters of the pool and discreetly splash your face. Rub the crusts from your eyes and the red-hot sauce from the corners of your mouth.

Sit on the barstool next to him: a late-twenty-something man, the one you've sized up as having a wad of cash in his breast pocket. Order something, anything, and drink it down, and let the bartender buy you another. You count on the fact that it will be paid for. Here he is, noticing you from the beginning, oblivious to your reek. He is young, and you see from his clothes, clearly not from here.

What is the cut-off point for the complete loss of sex appeal? Up until now, good grooming and posture, an attitude supported by money and friends, all have done wonders to hold off age. Then one morning you wake up and you hardly recognize yourself anymore. You'd seen this happen to others, but you couldn't figure out how or when it would happen to you. It would happen. But not yet.

Your shoulder turned to the young man has the effect of drawing him closer to the bar ledge. He pushes his drink your way with his index finger. You laugh to give him a flash of your still-good teeth: over-white and capped, the artificial blinding kind that outshine lipstick, which you don't have anymore. Keep talking, you think, you are saying something sassy to the bartender, overdoing it, mesmerizing him. The bartender throws back his head and laughs. He leans in. Too close maybe, and you gracefully back away a little. Neither one of them can feel threatened by the other. Nor can they feel sure. Keep the laughs going and any unsavoury scents from blowing their way. The transaction itself is wry and scripted on both sides, but mostly with the intent to create tension so that the young man is torn between feeling slightly left out of this sexual game and desiring to step in, to play the game. He seems a little unsure. Bashful yet somehow bold. He wants to try. He wants to be a man. He doesn't want to fuck it up.

You sense all of this, and you sense your advantage without even having looked his way. Now his wrist with the thick watch rises towards the bartender who shoots an annoyed glance at him – the young man orders two drinks: one for himself and one for you. The bartender relinquishes, straightens his shoulders, and slips back into his aloof persona, pouring and sloshing martinis.

One hour later, in a villa not a kilometre from your own where the bastard surely is, you are frantic in the young man's renoed bathroom, armed with his razor. Breathe, breathe, you tell yourself. You made sure he kept the lights off, kissing him at the car, then again as you entered the doorway so he wouldn't find the light, so instead was searching blindly to put his hands all over your body. Which you also held at bay. Silently putting your flip-flops into his garbage bin, you entered a chilly, high-ceilinged house.

“Let me use your bathroom first,” was all you'd said. He pointed through the darkness to a spiral staircase made of glass. You walked the first half of the ascent, then raced the second to the bathroom where you turned on the shower and scrubbed and washed your body and hair. “Hurry, hurry . . .” you now whisper to yourself, raking the razor over your armpits, up the sides of your vagina, along your calves, with a steady, practiced hand. Jump out and rub yourself dry, comb your hair, ransack his drawers for face cream or anything resembling makeup. All you find is a jar of Clarins for men and a single black eyeliner which you figure was left by a fling. He doesn't seem to have a present girlfriend. Or even live here himself often. The bathroom is empty, like a hotel. You place the packet of money and your NAUI card next to the sink, intending to collect it later on. You come back down the stairs naked and burning hot in his long white bathrobe.

“A freshen up.”

“I gathered.” Which is cue for him to gather you in his arms. He luxuriates in your full bum, squeezing it and kneading it into circles. Slips his hand into the robe, lunges and bites so you have to laugh a little, slow him down. He is breathing fast, trying hard to do it right. To control himself. He pulls away shocked, eyes wide.