How to Escape From a Leper Colony (18 page)

Then one day he walked into his father’s study to go over some paperwork and there was the painting. The window and the Indian woman. He stared at it. “Oh, you like it?” asked his father with amusement. “I’m trying it out. Seeing how it looks. I think your mother will hate it, but this is between us men.”

“It’s okay. I guess.”

“From a really beautiful woman painter. Lakshmi. Oh, that’s not it. Now what does it say?” He leaned forward to look at the gold signature. “Usha. Lovely woman. Charming, too.”

“Did she come here? Did she mount it herself?”

“Oh, yes. This morning. I was thinking I’d have your mother invite her for tea. Might be nice? Your mother might like the artist even if she doesn’t like the art.”

“Mother will hate that.”

“Exactly!” The elder man looked at the painting and then back at his son. He smiled. “The artist is even more beautiful than the painting.” Then he raised his eyebrows mischievously. Anexus dropped the papers he had brought on the desk and walked out.

He called her on the phone and she answered before the end of one ring. “I knew it was your house. I saw your pictures on the wall. You have a brother and a mother and a father. A sister-in-law. All right there in Trinidad. I should have known better. Really, I should have known.”

“He wants to invite you over for tea.”

“He already has, Jean. I’ll be there on Wednesday.”

“Don’t call me Jean.”

“In your fantasy you want me to be your wife, but you don’t even tell me your real name.”

“It’s not my real name.”

On Wednesday Jean arranged to be away all day. On Wednesday night when he went to his parents’ house the painting was still hanging in the study. He sat there until his father found him.

“Jean, I’ve bought the painting. The artist charged me a pretty penny. But your mother approved after all.”

Jean had that feeling again. The one where he wanted to say something or do something big. He had rehearsed it in his mind. But now he couldn’t say it. His father patted him on the head. “Maybe you should rethink NYU. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you better, but it might be good for you to explore the world and such.”

Jean Monroe nodded.

When he went to her that weekend there was a man in the house with her. He rushed at him and started to beat him with his fists. The man hollered and Usha came rushing out with a tray of tea service in her arms. “He’s the photographer. What the hell are you doing?”

The photographer stumbled to the couch in confusion. Jean stepped back and looked at Usha. “Where did you get that teapot and cups?”

“A gift from Patrique.”

“For what?”

She rested it down. Patrique was a good friend. One of her friends who had become their friend and visited them in Gasparee and invited them to his parties. Patrique made a lot of money off his pottery. He made entire plate and cup sets for rich white people not unlike the Monroes. “A gift for what?” He repeated with suspicion.

“For us.” She breathed. “An engagement gift.”

In the kitchen she took out a cigarette and blew out of the window. The smoke came drifting back into her face. “The photographer is just taking pictures of my paintings. So I can show them more easily.”

“Am I paying for it?”

“You don’t have to.”

“I just wanted to know. I just wanted to know how he was being paid.”

She put out her cigarette in the sink then passed him a bag of ice from the freezer. Jean took the ice outside to the photographer with the blooming black eye and said, “Sorry, man,” but didn’t mean it.

When the photographer left, Jean went into their little bedroom and lay facedown on the bed. He had to do something. But there was no movie or novel or anything to imitate for this. She came into the room. He could smell cigarettes and wine. Those were her smells.

“I’m going to New York,” she said. He did not respond. He felt dead. He felt as though the bed was a kind of coffin. “With the money from selling the painting.”

“I could have given you that same money,” he said, his mouth muffled by the pillow.

“Well, I wanted to earn it as a painter.” There was silence. He heard her exhale again and again. “I don’t know how I feel about having sex with my patrons. You know? I suppose prostitution is a kind of art, but I’m a painter and that’s it.” He had no idea what she was talking about but he knew she had rehearsed it. He knew she had been practicing it since she’d put up the painting in his father’s study and had seen his picture again and again as she walked through the halls of his parents’ big house. “Aren’t you going to New York University? I’ll be in Greenwich Village. They’re so close. Aren’t they?”

He sat up and nodded. Yes, in the States they could marry and no one would care. No one would even have to know. He could just be Anexus Corban. “I love you,” he said. “That’s for real.”

That night they took the poor people’s barge over to Trinidad to see a movie. It was the first time they had been in Trinidad, on the big island, for something other than a gallery opening or a private artist reception. The movie was a love story and Usha cried all through it. He held her but she kept crying. Not just tears but a heaving that made people stare at them as the theater emptied out. “Why are you crying so hard? What is it?” And she shook her head. But still he felt brave. “This isn’t a game, Usha. I’m for real.”

He didn’t follow her to the plane when she left two weeks later. It happened so quickly that he knew she had been planning it for longer than she had let on. But she gave him her new address in New York and he took this as a kind of concession. When she left he went to their Gasparee home and lay on the bed. “She is gone,” he said to himself. “You will follow.”

The day after Usha left he bribed Patrique, the ceramist, for her parents’ address. He was surprised to find out that it was deep in rural San Fernando—a part of the island he had never been to. He went racing down by car. And then he had to go slow. And then he had to ask people, because the directions, he realized, were not specific. But no one wanted to help him. And he had to beg and get out of the car and give money and finally he found the house and the parents were there at the door as if they had been expecting him. And it dawned on him that after all the questions and turnings around that someone had probably run to warn them that a white man was asking about for the parents of Usha Persaud. At the door they asked him, “What have we done?”

“I am a friend of Usha’s,” he said. They invited him in.

“She never mention you, sir,” said the father as they all sat in the tight living area.

“Are you Mr. Persaud?”

“Yes, sir. And this my wife.” The wife did not move to fetch him tea or water. She stared at him as though he were something exotic.

“I just …” And Jean looked around. It was a small wood house. This entire living and dining room no bigger than the bedroom in the humble bungalow he and Usha had shared. But on the walls were little paintings of windows. Miniatures. “I know her work. Her paintings.”

The father did not look impressed but the mother smiled and leaned forward. A young girl child with thick black hair cut short around her face shied in and sat next to the older woman. Jean stared at her. “I bought one of her paintings,” he finished but did not move his eyes away from the child. The parents looked at each other and then back at him.

“We ain seen her in almost three months. She does send money. But that’s all.”

“Do you know where she is?” he said with a sudden panic.

“She’s in the U.K.”

“Pardon me? I didn’t hear …”

“Our Usha. She is in London. In the U.K.”

Jean went to New York University that year. And he did not look for her. She had lied to him. It was a game after all. Perhaps by now she had sold his engagement ring. But then that would make his heart go soft because he had given her an engagement ring that was small and plain and way below his means. And yet while he was in the city he was filled with that feeling that she was there. That she was close. That if he just walked faster around a corner. If he just got to a bakery a little earlier. If he just went to one art opening instead of another, that she would be there and they could start over. They had only known each other for three months.

He studied for a degree in art history, which his father wrote to him was flippant but okay if it included estate management and museum curatory. It did not. After graduation he did not move home. He thought he would travel. He would study art all over the Caribbean. He thought he would start with the smaller islands, and the Virgin Islands were interesting because half was British and the other half American and he liked being able to visit America by just taking a boat from the British Tortola where he stayed. But he found that much of the art in the galleries of the V.I. was by European and American expatriates and covered Carnival and beaches, but not much else. The native painters there worked humble jobs as carpenters or fishermen and kept their masterpieces on their own walls—afraid of the corruption from the outside world that would settle like a film on their work. They were like superheroes. They taught secondary school English by day and then flashed paint around by night. It was hard for Jean Monroe to study them. It was hard to learn. Whenever he went to a gallery the docents or the owner would take him to look at their new acquisitions. When he asked for native painters, they would shake their heads as though scolding. “No, we don’t have that. Everyone asks, but we don’t have it. Sorry, Mr. Monroe.”

He lived like this for three years. On Tortola, where the art world was very small, only four or five full galleries on the whole rock, he was known and thought to be a kind of eccentric genius. He never bought paintings but he could talk about them for hours over a cigarette and a glass of wine. The expat women flirted with him, but he insisted that he was married and a faithful man. They giggled and never believed him. He survived by writing letters to his mother and father, who thought he had gone mad but sent him money anyway. And then he began to write Usha. He wrote to her again and again, mailing the letters to the rough address in San Fernando. He started them all the same way: “Dearest Usha. If I should die first I will have my ashes sent to you …”

And then a letter came from his mother that there had been a fire on Gasparee. That everything had burned down. All the buildings. Everything. The letter stayed in his fist for five hours. First he sat in his small room and tried to imagine the island of his best youth black with soot. Then he went out into the streets where there were bars frequented by tourists and newcomers and he drank Trinidadian rum and told everyone in a loud voice that this is what his wife’s crotch tasted like. Then he staggered back to his apartment and lay face down on the bed not knowing what to do, until he fell asleep and the letter slowly unfurled out of his palm.

The letter had not invited him but he still caught a plane that went through Puerto Rico and then directly to Port of Spain. He checked himself into a bed-and-breakfast and for two days he did not call his parents to announce that he had arrived in Trinidad. He went to galleries. On the second afternoon he walked into one and there on the wall was a huge painting with four big windows all open to the sun and shadow. No people in it at all. He stared at it. “Can I help you?” asked the docent and Jean jumped. There was a red dot on the painting that marked it sold.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes.” But then he could not say anything else.

“She’s a native Trini artist,” the lady said, looking him over now and wondering if he could afford anything so nice. She offered him a book of Usha Persaud’s paintings. It was a hardcover book. He opened it. The woman continued. “We represent her work and her husband’s.” He dropped the book and then fumbled to pick it up. He was twenty-five years old. In Tortola he had told everyone that his wife was a painter named Usha Persaud.

“Does she have a card? Is there a way that I can get in touch with her?”

“We sell her work. You can talk to me.”

“No, no.” He considered saying
we are old friends.
Or
we were lovers once.
Or
I am her husband.
“I would like to tell her that I am moved by her work.”

The woman reluctantly passed him a card. “Usha Persaud.” There were two addresses. One in London and one in New York. He walked out into the quiet street of Cascade. And walked until his legs gave way. “London,” he said out loud. “London
and
New York.” He sat down on the side of the road and began to weep.

Now Anexus Corban awoke in his condo and saw that it was still dark. He stretched, ignoring the painting as he did in the morning, and went for his shower. At the breakfast table he drank coffee and ate a large bowl of Cream of Wheat, both heaped with sugar.

The first apartment he lived in when he moved from the British Tortola to the U.S. St. Thomas had been in the back rooms of what was now the International Shop of Coffins. His shop. It had been in a place on island where it was cheap to live and when he’d leased it from the owners they had been happy. It was a hundred-year lease. Now the land that the shop sat on was worth enough for a man to retire on and live out his years in comfort. But he would not allow the owners to break the lease and the owners were a big family who could never decide what would be done with the land even if Corban did let it go. He was not often bothered.

When he returned from Trinidad with Usha’s painting under his arm, he had thought he would settle in Tortola and open a wood shop there. He would receive the initial wood free from his father’s company—now run by his brother. But when he returned to Tortola he had introduced himself as Anexus Corban and the people who knew him laughed and continued to call him Monroe. “Jean Monroe is dead,” he said. Some tried because they could see he was serious. The secretive native artists called him Anexus because they understood the need to live more than one life. But the gallery owners and art patrons did not take the Trinidadian seriously. So he left. And when he moved to St. Thomas he wrote Anexus Corban on his lease. He was given a driver’s license and he made business cards for himself. Soon the only thing that revealed the existence of Jean Corban Monroe was his Trinidadian passport.