The Early Stories (50 page)

At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie
 

Blowfish with lightbulbs inside their dried skins glowed above the central fortress of brown bottles. The bar was rectangular; customers sat on all four sides. A slim schoolteacherish-looking girl, without much of a tan and with one front tooth slightly overlapping the other, came in, perched on a corner stool, and asked for a daiquiri-on-the-rocks. She wore a yellow halter, turquoise shorts, and white tennis sneakers. The white bartender, who was not visibly malformed, nevertheless moved like a hunchback, with a sideways bias and the scuttling nimbleness peculiar to cripples. He wore a powder-blue polo shirt, and now and then paused to take a rather avid sip from a tall glass containing perhaps orange juice; his face was glazed with sweat and he kept peering toward the outdoors, as if expecting to be relieved of duty. The green sea was turning gray under round pink clouds. A boat dully knocked against the cement wharf, and suddenly the noise had the subtle importance noises in these latitudes assume at night. A member of the steel band, a tall, long-jawed Negro, materialized in the rear of the place, on a shallow shadowy platform where the cut and dented steel drums were stacked. After unstacking and mounting them, this Negro, who wore a tattered red shirt and held a dead cigarette in the center of his lips, picked up a mallet and experimentally tapped into the air a succession, a cluster, an overlapping cascade of transparent notes that for a moment rendered everyone at the bar silent.

Then a homosexual with a big head turned to the schoolteacherish girl, who had been served, and said, “See my pretty hat?” His head seemed big because his body was small, a boy's body, knobby and slack and ill-fitted to his veined man's hands and to his face. His eyes were rather close together, making him seem to concentrate, without rest, upon a disagreeable internal problem, and his lips—which in their curt cut somehow
expressed New York City—were too quick, snapping in and out of a grin as if he were trying to occupy both sides of his situation, being both the shameless clown and the aloof, if amused, onlooker. He had been talking about his hat, half to himself, since four o'clock this afternoon, and when he held it out to the girl an eddy of sighs and twisted eyebrows passed through the faces in the yellow darkness around the bar. The hat was a cheap broadweave straw with a bird's nest of artificial grass set into the crown, a few glass eggs fixed in the nest, and several toy birds suspended on stiff wires above it, as if in flight. “I designed it myself,” he explained. “For the carnival this weekend. Isn't it marvellously uninhibited?” He glanced around, checking on the size of his audience.

He was well known here. If he had scraped, from the surface of indifference, a few shreds of attention, it was because of the girl. Her coming in here, at this twilight hour, alone, bearing herself with such prim determined carelessness, was odd enough to attract notice, even at a tropical bar, where everything is permitted to happen.

“It's lovely,” she said, of the hat, and sipped her drink.

“Do you want to put it on? Please try it.”

“I don't think so, thank you.”

“I designed it myself,” he said, looking around and deciding to make a speech. “That's the way I am. I just give my ideas away.” He flung up his hands in a gesture of casting away, and a breeze moved in from the street as if to accept his gift. “If I were like other people, I'd make money with my ideas. Money, monnney. It's excrement, but I love it.” A brief anonymous laugh rose and was borne off by the breeze. The homosexual returned to the girl with a tender voice. “You don't have to put it on,” he told her. “It's not really finished. When I get back to my room, where I've been meaning to go all day, if that
fiend
”—he pointed at the bartender, who with his slightly frantic deftness was pouring a rum Collins—“would let me go. He says I owe him mo
nnn
ey! When I get back to my room, I'm going to add a few touches, here, and here. A few spangly things, just a few. It's for the carnival this weekend. Are you down here for the carnival?”

“No,” the girl said. “I'm flying back tomorrow.”

“You should stay for the carnival. It's wonderfully uninhibited.”

“I'd like to, but I must go back.” Slightly blushing, she lowered her voice and murmured something containing the word “excursion.”

The homosexual slapped the bar. “Forgive me, forgive me, dear Lord above”—he rolled his eyes upward, to the glowing blowfish and the great
roaches and tarantulas of straw which decorated the walls—“but I
must
see how my hat looks on you, you're so pretty.”

He reached out and set the hat with its bright hovering birds on her head. She took another sip of her drink, docilely wearing the hat. A child laughed.

The homosexual's eyes widened. This unaccustomed expression was painful to look at; it was as if two incisions were being held open by clamps. The child who had laughed was looking straight at him: a bright round face fine-featured as the moon, rising just barely to the level of the bar and topped by hair so fair it was white. The little boy sat between his parents, a man and a woman oddly alike, both wearing white cotton and having stout sun-browned arms, crinkled weather-whipped faces, and irises whose extremely pale blue seemed brittle, baked by days of concentration on a glaring sea. Even their hair matched. The man's had not been cut in months, except across his forehead, and was salt-bleached in great tufts and spirals, like an unravelling rope of half-dark strands. The woman's, finer and longer, was upswept into a tumultuous blond crown that had apparently sheltered the roots enough to leave them, for an inch or two, dark. They looked, this husband and wife, like two sexless chieftains of a thickset, seagoing Nordic tribe. As if for contrast, they were accompanied by a gaunt German youth with swarthy skin, watchful eyes, close-cropped hair, and protruding ears. He stood behind and between them, a shadow uniting three luminaries.

The homosexual crouched down on the bar and fiddled his fingers playfully. “Hi,” he said. “Are you laughing at me?”

The child laughed again, a little less spontaneously.

His parents stopped conversing.

“What a gorgeous child,” the homosexual called to them. “He's so—so
fresh
. So uninhibited. It's wonderful.” He blinked; truly he did seem dazzled.

The father smiled uneasily toward the wife; the pale creases around his eyes sank into his tan, and his face, still young, settled into what it would become—the toughened, complacent, blind face of an old Scandinavian salt, the face that, pipe in teeth, is mimicked on carved bottle-stoppers.

“No, really,” the homosexual insisted. “He's darling. You should take him to Hollywood. He'd be a male Shirley Temple.”

The child, his tiny pointed chin lifting in mute delight, looked upward from one to the other of his parents. His mother, in a curious protective motion, slipped from her stool and placed a sandalled foot on the rung of
her child's stool, her tight white skirt riding up and exposing half her thigh. It was thick yet devoid of fat, like the trunk of a smooth-skinned tree.

The father said, “You think?”

“I
think?
” the homosexual echoed eagerly, crouching farther forward and touching his chin to his glass. “I
know
. He'd be a male Shirley Temple. My judgment is infallible. If I was willing to leave all you lovely people and go dig in the dung, I'd be a stinking-rich talent scout living in Beverly Hills.”

The father's face collapsed deeper into its elderly future. The mother seized her thigh with one hand and ruffled the child's hair with the other. The dark German boy began to talk to them, as if to draw them back into their radiant privacy. But the homosexual had been stirred. “You know,” he called to the father, “just looking at you I can feel the brine in my face. You both look as if you've been on the ocean all of your life.”

“Not quite,” the father said, so tersely it wasn't heard.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I haven't been on the sea all my life.”

“You know, I
love
sailing. I love the life of the open sea. It's so”—his lips balked, rejecting “uninhibited”—“it's so free, so pure, all that wind, and the waves, and all that jazz. You can just be yourself. No, really. I think it's wonderful. I love Nature. I used to live in Queens.”

“Where do you live now?” the girl beside him asked, setting his hat on the bar between them.

The homosexual didn't turn his head, answering as if the sailing couple had asked the question. “I live here,” he called. “In dear old St. Thomas. God's own beloved country. Do you need a cook on your boat?”

The child tugged at his mother's waist and pulled her down to whisper something into her ear. She listened and shook her head; a brilliant loop of hair came undone. The father drank from the glass in front of him and in a freshened voice called across, “Not at the moment.”

“I wish you did, I wish to Heaven you did, I'm a beautiful cook, really. I make the
best
omelets. You should see me; I just put in the old eggs and a little bit of milk and a glass of brandy and some of those little green things—what are they called?—chives, I put in the chives and stir until my arm breaks off and it comes out just wonderful, so light and fluffy. If I cared about money, I'd be a chef in the Waldorf.”

The child's whispered request seemed to recall the group to itself. The father turned and spoke to the German boy, who, in the instant before bowing his head to listen, threw, the whites of his eyes glimmering, a dark
glance at the homosexual. Misunderstanding, the homosexual left his stool and hat and drink and went around the corner of the bar toward them. But, not acknowledging his approach, they lifted the child and walked away toward the rear of the place, where there was a jukebox. Here they paused, their brilliant hair and faces bathed in boxed light.

The homosexual returned to his stool and watched them. His head was thrown back like that of a sailor who has suffered a pang at the sight of land. “Oh dear,” he said aloud, “I can't decide which I want to have, the man or the woman.”

The schoolteacherish girl sipped her daiquiri, dipping her head quickly, as if into a bitter birdbath. One stool away from her down the bar, there sat a beefy unshaven customer, perhaps thirty years old, drinking a beer and wearing a T-shirt with a ballpoint pen clipped to the center of the sweat-soaked neckline. Squinting intently into space and accenting some inner journey with soft grunts, he seemed a truck driver transported, direct and intact, from the counter of an Iowa roadside diner. Next to him, across a space of empty stools, behind an untouched planter's punch, sat a very different man of about the same age, a man who, from his brick-red complexion, his high burned forehead, the gallant immobility of his posture, and the striking corruption of his teeth, could only have been English.

Into the space of three stools between them there now entered a dramatic person—tall, gaunt, and sandy. He displayed a decrepit Barrymore profile and a gold ring in one ear. He escorted a squat powdered woman who looked as though she had put on her lipstick by eating it. She carried a dachshund under one arm. The bartender, unsmiling, awkwardly pivoting, asked, “How's the Baron?”

“Rotten,” the Baron said; and as he eased onto his stool his stiff wide shoulders seemed a huge coat hanger left, out of some savage stubbornness, in his coat. The woman set the dachshund on the bar. When their drinks came, the dog lapped hers, which was a lime rickey. When he tried to lap the Baron's—a straight Scotch—the man gripped the dachshund's thirstily wagging rump, snarled “Damn alcoholic,” and sent him skidding down the bar. The dog righted himself and sniffed the truck driver's beer; a placid human paw softly closed over the mouth of the glass, blocking the animal's tongue. His nails clicking and slipping on the polished bar, the dog returned to his mistress and curled up at her elbow like a pocketbook. The girl at the corner shyly peeked at the man beside her, but he had resumed staring into space. The pen fixed at his throat had the quality of a threat, of a scar.