Euphoria (17 page)

We talked of our Grid.

‘Personality depends on context, just like culture,’ she said. ‘Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don’t you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, “Your typing makes my brain work better,” I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you. What are you looking at?’

I wasn’t looking at much of anything. I was just trying not to look at her. No sign of the moon, and the lake wasn’t visible save in the few seconds that the lightning flashed. But the air was shifting. I felt something that was almost a cool wind against my arms and face, but not a wind, not even a breeze, just an air current that felt different, as if someone ten feet away had opened the lid of an ice box briefly. I reached out to feel it and, as if I had beckoned it, a great gust struck against my hand. All at once the trees shuddered and the grass skirt about the house swished.

‘Let’s go down to the sand and make the rain come,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Let’s do a dance, like the Zuni.’

And then she was down the ladder, racing to the path. I followed. Of course I followed.

Neither of us knew an actual rain dance, but we improvised. She claimed ami was the Zuni word for rain. It was
cheating because the rain was coming, everything was shifting so fast, the wind had worked the tall palms into a froth above us and scudded hard against the water and the sky was low and black. But we stomped on the sand and called out Ami! Ami! and every other word we knew for rain and wet and water, and everything suddenly got blacker and cooler and the wind fierce and the memory of rain, real rain, came on quickly, only a few moments before the rain itself. We held our faces up and spread out our arms. Big drops smacked all over us and drove the insects on our skin to the ground.

The rain hit the lake water loudly and it took my ears several minutes to get used to the roar. You don’t realize in the dry season how much is held in, but now all the sounds and smells came back, stirred up by the wind and humidity, flowers and roots and leaves exhaling their full flavor. Even the lake itself released a pungent peat odor as the rain dug into it. Nell seemed smaller and younger and I could see her easily at thirteen, at nine, a little girl on a Pennsylvania farm, and all I could do was keep looking. I hardly knew I wasn’t speaking. ‘I think we should go in,’ she said.

I thought she meant go back to the house, but she turned from me and unbuttoned her dress and dropped it in the sand. She walked to the water in a brassiere and short American knickers, loose at the thigh. ‘I can’t swim, so you better join me.’

I quickly pulled off my shirt and trousers. The water was warmer than the air and felt like the first bath I’d had in two years. I sank in up to my neck and let my feet float to the surface as the rain hammered the water as if it were a sheet of silver.

She really couldn’t swim. How had I not noticed this before? I paddled around but she remained upright, bouncing on her toes. Of course I wanted to offer to teach her, to hold her as my mother had held me in the River Cam, to feel the weight of her in my arms, the edge of her brassiere against my fingers, knickers thin and wet as they broke the surface. I could feel it far too well without actually doing it, and I found I had to keep swimming away from her to try and subdue the effects, then swimming back to hear what she was saying through the smashing rain.

The rain was still lashing as we ran back up to the house. We put on dry clothes, each in the dark of our respective mosquito rooms. I fished out some old-looking Australian biscuits from the hoard and she asked if I was never not hungry. I said I was twice her size which led to an argument about how many inches were between us which led to measuring each other against a post, marking the spot with a penknife then calculating the difference. I held the measuring tape out flat, my fingers damp from the swim and dusty from all the biscuits. Seventeen inches.

‘It seems like more when it’s horizontal like that. Up and down it doesn’t seem so dramatic, does it?’

We were standing close by the pole and she was cheating by standing on her toes, her face lifted straight up and the rain crashing into the thatch above us and I wasn’t sure how I would kiss her without lifting her up to my lips. She laughed as if I had said this out loud.

We went back to the sofa and somehow I told her about Aunt Dottie and the New Forest and my trip to the Galápagos in ‘22. ‘My father had hoped the trip would make a biologist
out of me but the only valuable thing I discovered was that my body loves a hot, humid climate. Unlike yours.’ I nearly brushed my fingers along her scarred arm beside mine.

‘I come from hearty Pennsylvania potato farmers on my mother’s side. You’ll have to see me in winter. The cold gives me energy.’

I laughed. ‘I’m not sure I want to see what that looks like.’ But I did. More than anything I could think of.

She told me more about her potato-growing ancestors and their escape from the Great Famine, which put me in mind of Yeats’s ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan,’ and we ended up saying poems back and forth.

After the war I’d memorized most of Brooke and Owen and Sassoon, and half convinced myself that they’d been written by John. Or Martin, who actually did write poetry. The war poets were all tangled up with my brothers and my youth and I thought I would cry when I got to the end of ‘Hardness of Heart’ and the bit about tears not being endless, but I didn’t. Nell did the crying for both of us.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. Time for you and time for me, though I never did warm to Eliot. She was married. She was pregnant. And what would it have mattered in the end? What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.

We fell asleep reciting. Who was speaking or what poem I am not certain. We woke to little Sema and Amini poking us in the leg.

T
he morning began as the one before, with children scrambling in and out of her lap, and hand games and explosions of laughter. Bani brought me coffee and I worked at her typewriter. A few boys peered in through the netting. Chanta didn’t come but I thought more about my conversation with him and jotted down some questions for Teket when I returned.

All at once, far too early, Nell scooted everyone out of the house.

‘What’s going on?’ I called to her.

‘No mothers,’ she said. ‘No adult women today.’ She began packing her visiting bag. She was wearing the blue dress I’d first seen her in. ‘Something is going on. It happened last month and they wouldn’t let me in. I’m not going to be brushed off this time. I’ll be back at teatime.’ And she was gone.

By teatime Fen might be back, too.

I spent a few hours at their bookshelves and the piles of books around them. They had brought so many books, American novels I’d never heard of, ethnographies that had won prizes I didn’t know about, books by sociologists and psychologists with strange names from places like California and Texas.
It was a whole universe I barely knew existed. They had a mound of magazines, too. I read about Roosevelt’s election and something called the Cyclotron, an atom-smasher that forced particles around in circles to accelerations of over a million electron volts, at which point they broke and formed a new kind of radium. I would have stayed in reading all day, but Kanup came round to ask if I wanted to go fishing.

I followed him down to the water. The sky was clear and the sun beat down, but the ground was pocked and shredded from the storm, littered with huge fronds and leaves, nuts and hard unripe fruits. We crunched through piles of debris to get to his boat on the beach. Many canoes were already on the water, paddled by men. I asked him why the men were fishing today, and not the women.

He smiled and said the women were busy. He seemed to want to imply more, but not say it. ‘The women are crazy today,’ he said.

We checked our nets and headed out. The Tam men were born and bred to be artisans: potters, painters, and mask makers. They were, I learned that afternoon, staggeringly poor fishermen. They argued and insulted one another. Their fingers ripped holes in the fragile fiber nets. They didn’t seem to understand how the traps worked. Their loud voices scared the fish. I had a good chuckle watching them, but all the while I was aware of the far side of the lake, dimly shimmering, from where at any moment my canoe would reappear.

I was glad when we got back to shore, eager for tea with Nell and what little time alone with her remained. But Kanup wanted to wash out the canoe, which he thought smelled of fish though he hadn’t caught anything, and plug up a small
leak, so we went to get some gum sap from his house. I called up to Nell as we went by, but there was no answer.

When we returned to the beach she was standing ankle-deep in the water, both hands shielding her eyes, scouring the surface of the lake. Kanup was talking and she turned about and saw us. Her arms dropped to her sides.

‘They told me you’d left!’

‘Left?’

‘Yes. Chanta told me you’d gone off in a boat.’

‘I went fishing with Kanup.’

‘Oh, thank God.’ She grabbed me by my shirtsleeves. ‘I really thought you’d gone to find them.’

‘Bit late for that.’

Kanup had gone over to his canoe, but I did not follow to help him because Nell hadn’t let me go. She held on and examined the fabric of my plain white shirt. There was something different about her.

‘I thought you’d gone to Bett,’ she said.

‘Bett?’

‘Because she has a boat.’

I’d forgotten about Bett and her boat. And that I’d told Fen about her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said laughing, though she seemed to be crying, too. She let go of my shirtsleeves and brushed at her face quickly. ‘I’ve had a very strange day, Bankson.’

I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Let’s go up to the house.’

I gave Kanup an apologetic shrug, which I wasn’t sure he understood. But nothing could have separated me from Nell at that moment. I took one last fearful glance at the horizon. Empty. A bit more time. I followed her closely up the path.

We didn’t have tea. She poured us whiskey, and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe me.’

‘Of course I will.’

She stood up. ‘Sorry, I think I should write it all up first.’ She went to her desk and slid a piece of paper into her typewriter. I waited for the rush of keys. Nothing. She came back and sat down at the table. ‘I think maybe I do need to tell you.’ She took a long sip of her whiskey. She had a lovely throat, unmarred by the tropics. When she put the glass down she looked at me directly.

‘If I tried to tell Fen this, he wouldn’t believe me. He’d say I’d made it up, or mis—’

‘Tell me, Nell.’

‘As soon as I turned up the women’s road, I felt it, the same queer stillness as that one other time when they kept me out. I went straight to the last house, where smoke was coming out of all three chimneys and all the windows were sealed tight. I pushed through the curtain before anyone could stop me and was struck in the face by hot stinky wet air, like a smelly steam house. I gagged and tried to stick my nose out the doorway for some air but Malun pulled me in and took my basket and told me it was the
minyana
and they’d all decided I could stay.’

The
minyana.
She hadn’t heard this word before, she told me. When her eyes adapted to the dark room, she made out round black slabs of something cooking in small amounts of water on pans in the hearths. The room was full of women, many more than usual, and no one was mending a line or weaving a basket or nursing a baby. There were no children at all. Some of the women tended the pans on the fire and others were lying on mats along all sides of the room. All at once the black slabs were flipped over. They made a great clatter. They were stones, smooth round stones cooking in flat earthen pans. The women then left the stones and came away from the fire, carrying small pots they had been warming. Each woman on a mat was paired with a woman at the fire. An old woman named Yepe led Nell to a mat. ‘I tried to get my notebook from my basket but she stopped me and made me lie down.’ Yepe squatted next to her and unfastened her dress clumsily, inexperienced with buttons. Then she dipped her hands into the pot. They came out thick and dripping with oil and she placed them on Nell’s neck and began a slow massage, working her way down her back slowly, kneading, her hands moving easily in the thick oil. ‘It was happening like this all down the rows of mats, the massages deepening, quickening, and the women—you have to understand, these women are hardworking and unpampered; the Tam men are the ones who have much more leisure, who sit around painting their pots and their bodies and gossiping—these women started grunting and groaning.’

Nell got up for the whiskey bottle, and when she came back she took the seat sideways to mine, filled our glasses,
and put her feet on the rungs of my chair. ‘You’re sure you want me to go on?’

‘Quite sure.’

The massage became erotic. Yepe’s hands slid under her and cupped her breasts and rubbed her nipples with her thumb and moved to the buttocks and pushed the flesh hard up and down and pressed her fingers against the anus. The women on the mats were making a good deal of noise now, their bodies no longer passive but pushing up against the hands. Some of the women on the mats tried to reach between their legs or turn over but they were not allowed. Bo nun, someone said. Not yet. Yepe returned to her hearth and with a forked stick lifted steaming stones from the pans and placed them on a strip of bark cloth and brought them back. The women on the mats flipped over all at once. They cried out as the stones were rubbed with oil.

‘Well, you can probably imagine the rest,’ she said.

‘No, I can’t. I have an awful imagination.’

‘Yepe placed a stone here.’ She undid a few of the white front buttons of her blue dress and put my hand flat on her stomach. ‘And moved it in slow circles.’ Her skin was still oiled, still warm. I kept my circles small and slow on her taut belly, though I wanted to touch every bone, every patch of her. I wanted every part of her pressed against me.

‘Slowly, she pushed it up, up and along the collarbone.’ I did what she said and my hand, passing through, grazed her breasts (no brassiere today), which were fuller than I’d guessed, and traveled the ridge of her collarbone several times. ‘And down again, back and forth across the nipples.’ She watched me. I watched her. Our eyes had not lowered or shut.
So often a woman’s pleasure felt to me a mystery, the slightest wisp of a thing you were meant to find, and she having no better idea of where to look than you did.

‘Then she turned the stone on its side and brought it down—’

I kissed her. Or, as Nell later claimed, I leapt at her. I could not touch enough of her at once. I don’t remember removing clothes, hers or mine, but we were naked and laughing at our groping and when she reached down and felt me she smiled and said it wasn’t quite a stone, but it would do.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said as we lay stuck together, mottled in bugs and dirt.

‘Is it?’

‘Remember elephants in large boots?’

‘The ink blot?’

‘That was the sex card. You’re supposed to see something sexual. And you said elephants in large boots. It had me worried. Listen to that.’

Sounds came from every direction—the beach, the gardens, the fields behind the women’s road.

If I hadn’t understood, I might not have said it was human.

‘Lots of sex tonight,’ she said. ‘The men are a bit threatened by the stones, apparently. The night of the minyana they need to be reassured that their women still want them.’

‘Reassure away.’

We did not sleep that night. We moved to my mat and talked and pressed our bodies together. She told me the Tam believed that love grows in the stomach and that they went around clutching their bellies when their hearts were broken. ‘You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.

We knew that Fen could return at any moment, but we did not mention it.

‘The Mumbanyo kill their twins,’ she told me close to morning, ‘because two babies meant two different lovers.’ It was the only time she alluded to him or her pregnancy.

We did not hear Bani come up. He must have been standing there awhile, trying at first to give our spirits time to return to our bodies, for when he did rouse us his voice was loud and fed up. ‘Nell-Nell!’ His lips were touching the thin ghostly netting. ‘Fen di lam,’ he said. ‘Mirba tun.’

She leapt up as if a snake had bitten her. Bani went back down the ladder. ‘He’s halfway across the lake.’

‘Bugger.’

‘Yes, bugga,’ she mimicked. I touched her back as she groped around for her dress, and she stopped and kissed me, and I felt, stupidly, that it would all be okay.

We needn’t have hurried. When we reached the shore the boat was still far off. We could have stayed in bed, made love one more time.

‘He’s cut the engine too soon.’ I knew I’d now find any fault with him I could. ‘It wouldn’t disturb anyone from all the way out there.’ He’d tried to sneak up on us, I suspected.

Nell was shielding her eyes with her hand, though it was not a bright morning. There seemed to be no sun at all in the low metal-colored sky. It wasn’t raining, but it felt like we were breathing water. I wanted her to reach for me, claim me, but she stood rigid as a meerkat, focused on the boat, still a blemish, coming slowly toward shore. I touched the back of her neck, the short hairs that had come loose from her plait. I felt as wide open and undefended as a man can be.

‘Please dear God don’t let him have that flute,’ Nell said.

The outlines of the figures in the boat sharpened: one seated in the stern, one standing amidships. But they were still so far away. I wanted to go back to bed with her and resented this standing and waiting I had to do before he took her back. And I resented Bani for stealing these last minutes from me, even though Fen might have found her lying in my arms.

Bani and a few other boys were farther down the beach, talking boisterously and laughing, reliving, I was sure, the night before, rehearsing their stories for Xambun.

Nell was squinting. She’d left her glasses behind. ‘What do you see?’ she asked. ‘They’re saying it was a good hunt. They’re saying they’ve got something big, a boar or a buck.’

For a few moments that’s what it looked like: a good hunt, an animal slumped over the bow of my thin canoe.

And then one of Bani’s friends let out a scream. And I saw what he saw.

The standing figure in the middle was not a man but a long thick pole, the paddling figure in the stern was Fen, and what had looked like an animal carcass was Xambun draped diagonally in the bow.

‘What is it, Andrew?’ Nell wailed. I think it was the only time she ever said my first name.

I wrapped her in my arms and told her quietly in her ear. Behind us the screaming began and never stopped. The sides of my canoe were streaked with blood. When the boat came close enough, Bani and the other boys waded out up to their necks to reach Xambun. They lifted his body up off the boat and carried it high in their arms toward land.

Fen was saying the same thing over and over: Fua nengaina fil. I didn’t know what it meant. There was splashing and wailing and Xambun was handed over to Malun, who had come running and shrieking onto the beach. She sank to the wet sand with her son, his blood no longer running and his skin the color of driftwood. Nell pulled away from me and went to her. She wrapped her arms around Malun, but Malun threw her off. She hollered and shook Xambun, tears, spit, and sweat coming off her as she moved, as if she believed that with enough force she could bend back the universe.