Far-Flung (13 page)

“He’s so … enthusiastic,” said Albert. “And simple.”

I smiled. I had drunk more than I ought. The veranda seemed to be pitching in some silent nonexistent breeze. I held onto its marble balustrade and closed my eyes. “Actually, he’s very smart,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure he is. In a simple, enthusiastic sort of way.”

“You shouldn’t say mean things about him,” I said.

Albert inhaled. His cigar lit up, and for a second I could see all the furiously focused sparks of it. Then they went out. “May I tell you something?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Thomas still loves you,” Albert said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I can tell he is in love. And I doubt seriously it is with either me or Irene. That leaves you, Charles.”

“How can you tell he’s in love?” I asked.

“You forget I’ve had some experience with these things.” Albert traced the route of a blue vein up my forearm with a manicured finger.

I pulled my arm away. “Tom’s my friend,” I said. “I’m very fond of him, but he’s just my friend.”

“Famous last words,” said Albert.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.

“Of course you don’t,” Albert said. “This is precisely the sort of thing you avoid talking about.”

“It’s not my fault if Tom loves me,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was.”

“I don’t love Tom,” I said. “I love you.” I said this partially to disarm Albert and partially to see if it might be true. I couldn’t tell. I was about to repeat it when the shutters opened. Irene and Tom appeared, silhouetted against the brilliantly lit drawing room. For a moment everyone stood still.

“When do you boys head north?” Albert asked.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“You’re going up to Kunda?” Irene asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And Lake Moore. And then we’re going down south.”

“You’d better be careful. There’s been some trouble up north,” Albert said. “I hear the border is hot.”

“What did you think of them?” I asked. Tom and I were walking home along the muddy unmotivated river that curled through the city. I had yet to figure out in which direction it was supposed to flow, never having seen it do so.

“Irene seemed a little crazy.”

“She was drunk.”

“I know, but she seemed crazy, too. She tried to give me one of those snuffboxes.”

“You should have taken it,” I said. “What did you talk about up there?”

Tom smiled. He was kicking a piece of glass along the cobble-stoned street, paying it concentrated, irksome attention. I intervened and kicked it into the river, which swallowed it without a ripple.

“I forget,” Tom said.

“What did you think of Albert?”

Tom looked at me. “He’s charming,” he said. “In a neo-fascist kind of way.”

“What do you mean?”

Tom was scuffing the pavement, looking for something else to kick. He seemed nervous. A posse of nuns on bicycles passed us, and then disappeared. The city was full of nuns. I decided to change the subject.

“So,” I said. “Tomorrow we head north. Let’s hope it will be cooler.”

Tom stopped walking, and leaned against the river wall. A dugout canoe with a goat tethered in it was moored in the middle of the river. The goat bleated at us. “I don’t think I’m going,” said Tom.

“What?” I said.

“I think maybe I should go home.”

“What do you mean? You just got here.”

“I know that,” said Tom.

“So why do you want to go back?”

“I have a feeling maybe this won’t work out.”

“Why wouldn’t it work out?”

Tom looked at me. He shrugged. “It’s just a feeling,” he said.

“It will be fine,” I said. “We’ll spend some time in Kunda, it will be cool and beautiful. Kunda’s supposed to be really great. We like to travel together. We’re good at it. Why would there be a problem?”

Tom stared at the river, at the goat in the boat, and on the far shore at the abandoned skeletons of the office buildings the Commerce Government had begun to build before its recent demise. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Everything’s cool, Tommy,” I said. “Relax.”

I was sitting up in the king-size bed in our hotel room, safe within a flurry of mosquito netting. Tom stood beside the bed, wearing a pair of gym shorts, drying his hair with a towel monogrammed “The Royal Kunda.”

“There’s a lizard in the bathroom,” said Tom,

“Better lizards than bugs,” I said.

“There are bugs, too,” said Tom. “Are you going to take a shower?”

“I’ll take one in the morning.”

“I’ve never slept under a mosquito net,” Tom said. Tom is the sort of person who takes delight in doing things for the first time. He is constantly losing some sort of virginity. I once found this quality endearing. He touched the gauze shroud. “How do you get in? Do you climb under?”

“You lift it up,” I said.

“Oh.” He returned the towel to the bathroom, bolted the door, switched off the light, and resumed his post beside the bed. The combination of the gauze and dark masked his features, but I could feel him looking at me.

“Get in,” I said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

He lifted the net and stooped beneath it, and then he was inside, better focused, large and luminous. I thought of him entering Paris for the first time. I moved to one side of the bed as he got in. We lay side by side for a long, silent while. I could smell his clean skin. And then, like a perfectly scheduled train, I saw his hand set out across the blank expanse of sheet between us. For a moment I thought my anticipation and dread had set it in motion—that I had somehow willed him to touch me by dreading he might. And then he did touch me; his fingers slid up and gently clasped my arm right below my elbow. It was an odd, unerotic place to hold someone. It was where you’d hold someone to pull him back from traffic, or other sudden dangers.

Kunda was full of Germans, cafes, elephants, and posters of blond women fellating bottles of Coca-Cola. Most of the buildings were made of mud; it was hard to believe that come the rains, they wouldn’t all wash away.

We had wandered down through town all morning, from one terraced level to another, and noon found us on its grassy outskirts.

“We could visit the fish caves,” said Tom, who was in possession of our tourist map.

“What are the fish caves?”

“I don’t know. It’s just on the map with a blue star. That means it’s a natural phenomenon.”

“Where are they?”

“Just a little bit out of town, going east.” He pointed down the road.

“How far?”

“You look. I say about a mile.”

We started walking east out of town. Along the roadside, people were sitting beneath jerry-built tents, trying to sell the odd objects spread out before them: gourds, widowed shoes, and strange cuts of meat swaddled in leaves. One woman had dozens of cheeping sparrows in tiny cages woven from sticks. The cages were only barely bigger than the birds. Her sign read: PLEASE SET FREE THESE BIRDS YOU WILL BE HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS. We passed the woman and turned off the road at a sign that said FAMOUS FISH CAVES. Inside a spectacular wrought iron gate a beautiful woman was selling little bunches of what appeared to be salad. Each bunch was wrapped in colored wax paper. She held them in a tray projecting from her chest, like a New Age cigarette girl.

“You buy some,” she told us.

We declined her offer and walked down the path into the dry, scrubby woods. She followed us at a distance. We approached an enclave of massive boulders which surrounded a small pool of dark still water.

The woman had caught up with us. “Fish cave,” she announced.

We all stood and stared at the water. The air around us was surprisingly cool. “Where are the fish?” I finally asked.

The woman indicated her colorful packages. “For food, they’ll come,” she said.

“That’s fish food?” asked Tom.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s so pretty,” said Tom.

“They are special fish,” she said. “You’ll see if you feed them.”

“How much?”

She told him, and he bought a package of greens. The care with which it had been assembled necessitated his unfolding it with reverence. Tom held a little bouquet of strange-shaped leaves and yellow clover-like flowers.

“Feed them.” The beautiful woman was losing patience. She glanced back toward the gate, but we were still alone.

“All at once?” Tom asked.

She shrugged.

Tom tossed the bouquet into the black water. It spun idly for a moment, and then the pool erupted with huge blue carp. They churned the water into froth, leaping at the weeds. When they had devoured Tom’s bouquet they loitered near the surface, swishing their tails, watching us.

“More?” the beautiful woman asked.

The ritual was repeated: the tossing, the feeding frenzy, followed by the blue-tinted, tail-flashing shallow lurk.

“More?”

I had the feeling we could be there forever, that those horrible fat fish would never be sated. “Let’s go,” I said.

“O.K.,” said Tom. “No, thank you,” he said to the woman. She turned and walked back toward the gate.

Tom and I remained at the fish cave. The fish sank lower as time passed, like something being erased, until the water returned to its primordial blankness. “That was something,” Tom finally said. “I’ve never seen fish like that.”

“They were more like pigs,” I said.

Tom squatted and dipped his hand into the water. “It’s freezing,” he announced. We both watched his hand float, palm up, just below the water’s dark skin. It made me nervous: The fishes’ appetite had seemed carnivorous. I had a feeling Tom not only sensed but enjoyed my unease, so I squatted beside him and dangled my fingers in the water. His hand swam toward mine. Our fingers touched, but the water was so cold I couldn’t feel it. I let my hand drift away.

“It’s much cooler here than back in town,” Tom said. “It would be a nice place for a picnic.”

“We don’t have anything to eat,” I said.

“Let’s just sit down for a while,” said Tom. “Over there, by those trees.”

I followed him to a grassy clearing in the flowering trees where the sun was haphazardly strewn across the ground. Bees buzzed around us.

“This is beautiful,” said Tom. He was lying on his back, his head pillowed by his knapsack, his eyes closed. I stood against the tree and watched him. His hands were clasped behind his head, his face angled toward the sun. Tom loved the sun. I first saw him three years ago, on the beach at Edisto. It was very early in the morning, and the beach was empty. Tom had been lying alone in much the same position as he lay now. For a moment I thought he was dead but then I realized he was sleeping. I stood and watched him. Normally I would never stop and watch someone sleep on the beach but I was not acting normally when I met Tom, and that is how you fall in love: by not being yourself or being too much yourself or by letting go of yourself, and I did one, or perhaps all, of those things; I stood and waited for Tom to wake up and he woke up and I sat down beside him on the cool sand. And now, as I watched Tom lie in the sun here on the other side of the earth years later, I wondered if perhaps I did still love him. But what I felt was an awful staining fondness, not love.

The beautiful woman was escorting two German couples toward the fish cave. Tom opened his eyes. We watched them disappear behind the rocks. “So,” said Tom. “Here we are.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sit down,” said Tom.

I sat down, a little wary: Tom always initiated a troubling conversation by saying “So.” Whenever he said so, I heard
beware.

“It’s nice to lie here in the sun,” he said, “and think of everyone shivering back home. It gives me great pleasure.”

“Good,” I said, and I meant it, as I was glad Tom was experiencing great pleasure. This was not something he often admitted.

“Actually,” said Tom, “I’m not feeling great pleasure.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Actually, I’m feeling kind of desperate.”

“About what?” I asked.

“About this,” said Tom. “About us.”

I said Oh again. Tom looked at me. “What are you feeling?” he asked.

There is only one question I hate more than “What are you feeling?” and that is “What are you thinking?” I believe one should be at liberty to express one’s thoughts and feelings at one’s own pace; to be prompted in this way is, I think, rude. I know for a fact Tom thinks otherwise. He thinks he is doing me a favor by asking these questions, but it is dangerous and stupid of him, for the responses he elicits are seldom the responses he desires. In answer to his question, I said, “What am I feeling about what?”

“Us,” he said.

I shrugged. I heard the Germans exclaim over the appearance of the blue fish. I pretended to be distracted by their exclamations. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I’m not feeling anything. I’m just glad, you know, that we’re together, that we’re friends, that we’re traveling together. I think it’s nice.”

“Nice?” said Tom.

“I think it is,” I said. “Don’t you?”

Tom didn’t answer. He closed his eyes. His face was no longer in the sunlight; it was laced with shade. “It’s not obvious?” he asked.

“What?” I said, although of course I knew. I had known from the very beginning, from the moment Tom had crossed the tarmac and entered THE MEETING AND GREETING AREA. I had not needed Albert to tell me.

“I still love you,” he said. He opened his eyes.

I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing. How pathetic the unloved are, I thought. How assiduously they suffer, how they cultivate their rejection, picking again and again at their scabs.

“I just thought I should tell you,” said Tom. “Although I guess I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I just thought, you know, that that was all over.”

“I know,” said Tom. “So did I.”

“It’s over for me,” I said.

“I know,” said Tom. “I know that.” He stood up, and hoisted his knapsack to his shoulder. “Forget I said anything,” he said. “Let’s go.” He began to walk back toward the road. I followed him. On the way into town we stopped and liberated a bird. Tom tore the twig cage apart. The bird jumped out and sat by the side of the dusty road. I tried to make it fly by prodding it with a stick but it wouldn’t. It just sat there, stunned, it seemed, by its freedom.