Finding a Girl in America (10 page)

The hotel at St. Croix was a crescent of separate buildings facing the sea. The beach was short and narrow, bounded by rocks that hid the rest of the coastline. About thirty yards out, a reef broke the surf, and the water came gently and foamless, and lapped at the beach. Peter could have walked to the reef without wetting his shoulders, but he stayed close to shore, swimming in water so shallow that sometimes his hands touched rocks and pebbles and sand. Jo was curious about him in that warmly possessive way that occurs when people become lovers before they are friends, and on the first day she asked him about the water. They were in lounge chairs near a palm tree on the beach, and she was watching his face. He looked beyond the reef at the blue sea and sky.

‘I don't know. I've always been afraid of it.'

‘What about the beach at home. You said you liked it.'

‘I do. But I don't go out over my chest.'

‘Maybe you just went for your children.'

‘No. I love it. And this.' He waved a hand seaward. ‘And bodysurfing. The worst about that is when I turn my back. I don't like turning my back on the sea.'

‘Let's leave Buck Island to the fish.'

She was smiling at him, and there was no disappointment in her face or voice.

‘You'd enjoy it,' he said.

‘It's not important.'

Each morning after breakfast he went alone to the hotel lobby and chose a postcard for David and Kathi from the racked pictures of the sea, beaches, a black fisherman squatting beside a dead shark on the wharf, scarlet-flowered trees, coconut palms, steep green hills, tall trees of the rain forest. He had not told them he was going to St. Croix with a woman, nor had he told them he was going alone, and on the postcards he wrote crowded notes about the island. On one he wrote that mongooses lived here but there were no snakes, so they ate lizards and frogs, and some of the young men killed them and soaked their tails in rum for two weeks, then wore them stiff like feathers in their hatbands. Then he realized that David would want a tail, so he tore up the card and threw it away, and began watching from taxi windows for a dead mongoose on the road. He also wrote that he wished they were with him, and next year he would wait until June, when they were out of school, and he would bring them here. He did not send them a picture of the hotel. The wound he had opened in himself when he left them had not healed, and it never would; now going to St. Croix was like leaving them again. Jo was glad to be away from her daughters for a week, so Peter did not talk to her about his children.

Always the trade winds were blowing across the island, and Peter only felt the heat when he walked on the lee side of a building. The breeze cooled the town of Christiansted too, where they went by taxi in late afternoons, and walked the narrow streets of tourist shops and restaurants, and looked at the boats in the harbor. On the third day, they went sailing at sunset on a boat owned by Don Jensen, a young blond man with a deep tan, who charged them twelve dollars and kept their paper cups filled with rum punch from the ice chest in the cabin, and told them he and his wife had come from California six years ago, that she taught painting at a private school on the island and, when the sun was low, he told them if they were lucky they'd see the green ball when it sank under the horizon, though he had rarely seen it. But he had seen dust in the sky, blown from Africa, hanging red in the sunset. And he asked if they were going to Buck Island. Peter and Jo were sitting on benches on opposite sides of the boat. Peter looked at the glittering water near the sun and said: ‘I'm afraid of it.'

‘Can you swim?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's something you ought to see.'

‘I know.'

‘Nobody's ever drowned there. With the snorkel and fins, you just can't. I even take nonswimmers: kids who just hold onto a float and kick.'

‘I want to see it. I don't want to get home, and then wish I had.'

‘Are you sure?' Jo said.

‘I think I'd like it when it's over.'

They watched the sun go down, did not see the green ball, then sailed back to Christiansted in the twilight. That night Peter and Jo got drinks from the hotel bar and took them to the beach and sat in upright chairs. He watched the gentle white breakers at the reef, and looked out at the dark sea, listened to it, smelled it. Next morning at breakfast he told the waitress where they were going, and she said: ‘I never go in the water. We have a saying: The sea has no back door.' At eight-thirty he was on it, Don standing at the wheel next to the cabin door and working the sail, the long boat heeling so that when it rocked his way, to starboard, he could have touched the water with his hand, and the spray smacked his face and bare shoulders and chest, and when he looked up at Jo sitting on the port bench he could see only the sky behind her; when the boat heeled her way, he held onto his bench, and the sky was gone, and he was looking past her face, down at the sea. She bowed her head and cupped her hands to light a cigarette. When she straightened, Peter shaped his lips in a kiss. She returned it. He tried to care whether she was getting seasick or sunburned or was uncomfortable in the sea-spray, but he could not: his effort seemed physical, as though he were trying to push an interior part of his body out of himself and across the boat to Jo. With a slapping of sail Don brought the boat about and it steadied and now when it rocked, Peter could see both sky and water behind Jo. The spray was not hitting them. He half turned and watched the shore of St. Croix and the hills rising up from it, dirt roads climbing them and disappearing into green swells of trees. A tern hovered near the boat. Beyond Jo, toward the open sea, two black fishermen sat in a small pink sailboat. Peter crossed the boat, his feet spread and body swaying, and took one of Jo's cigarettes, his first since leaving home. She smiled and pressed his hand. He went back to the bench and watched the horizon and thought of shopping this afternoon for David and Kathi, then drinking at the roofed veranda of the Paris Cafe, where the breeze came with scents of cooking and sweet flowers.

He looked ahead of the boat at Buck Island, and sailboats anchored around a boatless surface that he knew covered the reef. The island was a mile long, and steep and narrow, and stood now between them and the open sea. On this side of it the water and wind were calm. Beyond the uneven curve of anchored boats, people were swimming the trail, a waving line of them with snorkels sticking out of the water; most wore shirts to protect their backs from the sun. While Don dropped the anchor, Peter found children swimming in the line. He looked into the water beside the boat and saw the sand bottom. Don came up from the cabin, carrying masks and snorkels and fins.

‘It's about a hundred yards, there and back. Maybe a little more. How are you?'

‘All right, I think.'

‘Keep letting me know.'

Don gave them fins and, when they had put them on, he showed them how to use the mask and snorkel. Peter took a snorkel from him and put it in his mouth and breathed through it, then took the mask and looked at the green island and up at the sky, then pulled the mask over the snorkel tube and his face, and went to the ladder, feeling nothing that he could recognize of himself, feeling only the fins on his feet, and the mask over his nose and eyes, and the mouthpiece against his gums and teeth.

Don told them to swim near the boat until they were used to the snorkel, then he went down the ladder. Jo went next, and Peter looked at Don treading water, then watched her climbing down; when she pushed away from the ladder he turned and backed onto it, and down: legs into the water, then his waist, and when his feet were beneath the last rung he still worked down the ladder with his hands until his arms were in the water, then he turned, swimming a breast stroke, his face in it now, his breathing loud in the tube, and he looked through the mask at the sand bottom and the anchor resting on it. When he saw to his left the keel and white hull of the boat, he jerked his head from the water and swam overhand to the ladder and grasped it with one hand while he took the snorkel from his mouth. Then Don and Jo were on either side of him, snorkels twisted away from their lips. He shook his head at Don.

‘It's worse than I thought,' he said.

‘I was watching you. You looked all right.'

‘No. I can't do it.'

Jo moved to Don's side, treading.

‘I panicked a little at first,' she said. ‘You just have to get used to breathing.'

‘No. You two go on, and I'll wait on the boat. I'll drink beer in the sun.'

Their faces were tender, encouraging.

‘I've got some floats aboard,' Don said. ‘What about trying that?'

‘Me and the kids who can't swim. All right.'

He moved one hand from the ladder until Don climbed past him, then he held on with both again.

‘I wish you'd go without me,' he said to Jo.

‘I wouldn't want to think of you alone on the boat.'

‘If you knew how I felt in the water you'd rather think of me alone on the boat.'

‘We could just go back.'

He shook his head, and moved a hand from the ladder as Don came down with a small white float. Peter blew into the snorkel, placed it in his mouth, and took the float. Kicking, he stretched out behind it, and lowered his face into the water, into the sound of his breath moving through the tube past his ear; he looked once at the sand bottom, then raised his head and took out the mouthpiece. Don was beside him. He knew Jo was behind him, but he felt only water there.

‘That's it. I drink beer.'

‘How about this: you just hold onto the float and I'll pull you.'

Now Jo was with them.

‘That's a lot of trouble, just so I can see some fish and a reef.'

‘It's easy. I just hold the strap.'

‘Everybody's so kind around here, I don't have much choice. You won't let go?'

‘No. Just relax and look. You'll be glad you saw it.'

Peter grasped the corners of the float and watched Don's kicking legs which were his only hold on air, on earth, on returning to the day itself; and he concentrated on the act of breathing: in the tube it sounded as though it would stop and he would not be able to start it again; he emptied and filled his lungs with a sense that he was breathing life into the Peter Jackman who had vanished somewhere in the water behind him. He had no picture of himself in the water. He floated without thoughts or dreams, and when he entered the trail he saw the coral reef, and growing things waving like tall grass in the wind; he saw fish pause and dart; fish that were black, golden, scarlet, silver; fish in schools, fish alone, and he could not remember anything he saw. He recognized one fish as it swam into a tiny cave and three breaths later he could not remember its name and shape and color. Scattered along the trail were signs, driven into the bottom. They welcomed him to Buck Island National Park, quizzed him on the shapes of fish drawn on a signboard, told him what was growing near a sign ... He found that he could remember the words longer than he could a fish or plant or part of the reef. He read each sign, and as he moved away from one he tried to hold its words in his mind; then the words were gone, and all he knew was the fluid snore of his breath, and the water: as though he were fathoms deep, he could not imagine the sky, nor the sun on his back; his mind was the sea bottom, and was covered too with that blue-green dispersal of his soul.

Then he saw only water and sand. He watched Don's legs, and waited for the reef again; he looked for fish, for signs, but the water now was empty and boundless and he wanted to look up but he did not, for he knew he would see miles of water to the horizon, and his breathing would stop. Then he saw a white hull. He was moving toward it, and the legs were gone; he looked up at the boat and sky, took the snorkel from his mouth, let go of the float, and grabbed the ladder. He did not look behind him. He climbed and stepped over the side and pulled off the mask and sat on the bench and took off the fins before Jo's hands, then masked face, appeared on the ladder. She was smiling. He looked at the deck. He watched the black fins on her feet as she crossed it, then she stood over him, smelling of the sea, and placed her hands on his cheeks. Don came over the side, carrying the float.

‘You seemed all right,' he said. ‘How was it?'

‘Bad.'

Jo lifted his face.

‘You didn't like any of it?'

‘I didn't see any of it.' He looked at Don. ‘You know something? I didn't even know you had turned and headed back. Not till you let me go at the boat.'

‘You'd better have that beer now. Jo?'

‘Please.'

He went down into the cabin.

‘I want you to tell me about the fish,' Peter said.

‘But you saw them.'

‘No I didn't.'

‘Maybe you'd better tell me about that.'

‘I want you to tell me about the fish,' he said.

On the ride back he drank beer and smoked her cigarettes and listened to her talking about the fish and the reef. For a while her voice sounded as it did on those nights when they fought and, the fight ended, they talked about other things, past their wounds and over the space between them. He did not watch her face. St. Croix was beyond her, and he looked at the sky touching the hills, and listened to Jo and Don talking about the reef. But he could not remember it. Sometimes he looked over his shoulder at the horizon and the dark blue swelling sea.

That night, after Jo was asleep, he dressed and crept out of the room and went to the beach. Lying sunburned in a chair he shuddered as the sea came at him over the reef, and he looked beyond the breakers at the endless dark surface of it, and watched the lights and silhouette of a passing ship, fixed on it as though on a piece of solid and arid earth, and remembered the summer evening four years ago when he and Ryan, both drunk, had left their wives and children in the last of the charcoal smoke on Ryan's sundeck and had rowed an aluminum boat in a twilight fog out to the middle of the lake where they could drink beer and complain about marriage, and Ryan had stood in the bow to piss, and the boat had turned over; Peter hit the water swimming to the shore he could not see. He heard Ryan calling him back to the boat but he swam on into the fog, and when he tired he four times lowered his legs to nothing but water, and finally the evergreens appeared above the fog; he swam until he was in reeds and touching mud, then he crawled out of the water and lay on mud until Ryan came in, kicking alongside the overturned boat. When he and Norma and David and Kathi got home and he stepped into the shower and was enclosed by water he started to scream.