Voyager: Travel Writings (12 page)

It was no longer just the final few years of my marriage to Christine and the year in Jamaica that were beating me down. By now I was being tumbled by breaking waves of memories of Becky, my third wife, memories of the pleasures of a low-intensity love affair with her, such a relief after those turbulent, sexually fraught years with Christine and our explosive divorce, and then memories of marrying Becky and living with her for five years in New York City, and memories of going off alone for a semester as writer-in-
residence at the University of Alabama and meeting Chase there, and memories of having to return to Becky at semester’s end and having to choose whether to tell her that I had fallen in love with another woman, or lie and begin conducting a clandestine love affair, which would have permanently contaminated my love for that other woman, or say a permanent good-bye to that other woman, who, it was clear to me, would be the love of my life for the rest of my life.

I told Becky that I had fallen in love with another woman.

There are probably no more painful words for a husband to say or a wife to hear, especially a wife who loves her husband more than he loves her. Especially when the man in fact loves the woman, yes, he does—just not as much as she loves him. Until I chose to say the words to Becky, I had not been obliged to say them to anyone. When I was twenty-one and my marriage to Darlene foundered and sank, there was no one who had displaced her in my heart. And after fourteen stormy years of melodrama, growing incompatibility, betrayal, frustration, and rage, when my marriage to Christine finally shattered, as if tossed by the storm against the cliffs of our warring self-interests—everyone overboard, fathers and mothers first—there was no one waiting in a nearby lifeboat with open arms and heart for either of us. At the end of my first and second marriages I was not already in love with another woman.

I said to Chase, Perhaps with Becky I simply fell out of love instead and then met you in Tuscaloosa.

No, I’d remember that and anyhow would not have left any of the three women for that alone. Especially Darlene.

Okay, so maybe I never loved Darlene or Christine or Becky in the first place, I said to Chase.

No, definitely not true. Or, Reader,
I’d not have married them.

Possibly I did not love them enough, I told her.

Not that, either. I loved Darlene and Christine and Becky, too, more than most men love their wives.

Or maybe—and this gets closer to the truth—I had finally
realized that I could never make any of them happy. Except by my absence.

Though I had no words or understanding for it then, with great reluctance I had concluded that I simply could not meet my first and second and third wives’ seemingly insatiable needs—needs that I’d been trained since childhood to find irresistibly seductive. For they had been put to me as desires that only I could satisfy. Problems that only I could solve. Conflicts that only I could resolve. Needs, problems, conflicts that in the end no man, no other human being, could satisfy, solve, resolve.

Just as I was incapable of making Darlene or Christine or Becky happy, I had been unable, boy and man, to make my mother, the primal wife, happy, either. No one on the planet, boy or man, could satisfy her bottomless, hydra-headed hunger for attention and control. It was a hunger so ravenous and impossible to sate as to be an essentially metaphysical contradiction. None of us was aware of it at the time or had access to words for it—not my mother, not Darlene, not Christine, not Becky, and certainly not I. But theirs was not merely a psychological or emotional disorder, a neurosis or minor mental illness that could be treated with psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals and kindness. Or by the love of a good man. Through no fault of their own and, if I may say, no fault of mine, either, I was doomed, boy and man, to fail to satisfy their simple unchecked hunger for universal centrality. As a consequence they grew angry. They wailed and gnashed their teeth and beat their breasts and clawed at their tear-soaked cheeks. Their grief and rage were caused by the irreducible nature of human reality. It was as if I were humanity’s sole male representative on earth, and not merely a son or a husband, and for their satisfaction those needs were directed at me alone. Each woman was manacled to a bottomless, contradictory, impossible need to exist as both the center of the known universe and its encompassing entirety, too.

At sixteen, with Dario Morelli in his dad’s Olds 88, I was running from my mother’s frustration and rage over my failure
to resolve that contradiction for her; and again at eighteen, when I insulted the pleasure and pride she took from my scholarship at Colgate, it was the same set of causes and effects that sent me running. At twenty, when I abandoned Darlene and Leona, and at thirty-seven, when I violently disassembled the fourteen-year-long marriage and household I had shared with Christine, and at forty-seven, when I left Becky for Chase, it was the same old, by now all-too-familiar flight from grief and rage generated in the women I loved by my inability to resolve the fundamental contradiction of their needing to be both the center of the universe and the universe itself, and their inability to acknowledge any metaphysical difference between the two. It was as if the solar system were simultaneously Ptolemaic and heliocentric, and the sun revolved around the earth and the earth revolved around the sun, too.

When, four years after my divorce from Christine, I settled into a life in New York City with Becky, I thought it would be entirely different. And, indeed, in the beginning it mostly was. It seemed clear that Becky was no narcissist, and at first she made no demands on me that I couldn’t meet. Nor was she angry at me for failing to make her both the center of the universe and its surround as well. Not at first. She was a calm, some might say placid, woman ten years younger than I, previously unmarried and childless. She was originally from Fort Worth, Texas. Slim and pretty and tough in the benign, adaptable way of a nineteenth-century American pioneer woman, she was blond and green-eyed and very pale-skinned, possibly the whitest woman I have ever known. With a curious mixture of embarrassment and pride, she sometimes said of herself, I’m like white on rice.
She was. She’d struck out early for a life different from her parents’—her father was an electronics engineer and her mother a retired schoolteacher—and had gone east for a life more glamorous and artistic and risky than theirs. She’d taken a graduate degree in creative writing and ended up a few years later running a national writers’ organization based in Norfolk, Virginia.

Then—at an unfortunate time for both of us, as it turned out—
I sat on one of the panels at the annual meeting of her organization, and we met and quickly slept together. It should have ended there, probably. I was recently divorced from Christine and still trembling from it, struggling to withdraw my forces from the field of battle, but obliged nonetheless to continue fighting a rearguard action over childcare, money, and the true narrative of our long marriage and its dissolution. Becky had endured some childhood traumas—her parents’ divorce, her father’s mental illness and hospitalization—and had recovered from a couple of serious adulthood shocks to her system: the suicide of a lover, an assault by a home invader. But she spoke of these events with cool detachment, almost as if they had happened to someone else.

She seemed to me more stoical than merely repressed. Or depressed. She was calm and rational, undramatic and unaffected, and flexible in all ways—the apparent opposite of my ex-wife Christine. And she seemed to be very independent. She was lonely and terminally bored and frustrated by her job. As it happened, I was about to quit my teaching job in New Hampshire for a position to be split between Columbia and Princeton and base myself in New York City, and Becky wanted to get out of Norfolk. She had abandoned her desire to become a fiction writer, but she was well trained and understood fiction writing from the inside out. Maybe she’d try to become an editor in a big New York publishing house.

The novelist Nelson Algren used to warn younger men never to sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than their own. Which applies as much (or as little) to the men women choose to sleep with, too. Algren was a mentor for me, and when I was in my early twenties he was a friend, and I probably should have listened more closely to him and remembered his advice when, in my early forties, I started sleeping with Becky and gradually learned that her troubles were worse than mine. Her ability to distance herself from them, however, and, with a wry, self-deprecating smile and shrug, file them under
Dysfunctional Family
and
Long Ago
(her childhood and adolescence) and
Far Away
(Fort Worth, Texas; Fayette
ville, Arkansas; Norfolk, Virginia), gave me license to sleep with her and still credit myself with having followed Algren’s advice. And because that went well, the sex, and she seemed to get along easily with my four daughters, and gave evidence of wanting to be married to me; and because it appeared that she needed me in order to be made happy; and because it looked as if finally a good woman’s happiness could actually be achieved through marriage to me—yes, Reader, once again, I married her.

From St. Lucia, the next logical stop was a long eastward hop to Barbados. The transition was sharp, however, and not pleasant. More than any island Chase and I had visited so far, Barbados had successfully transformed itself into a full-blown resort. As Gertrude Stein reportedly said of Oakland, there was no there there. Except perhaps on the northeast coast, where the Atlantic winds constantly blew and the surf was too rough for swimmers. It was where the Bajans themselves went on vacation. Farley Hill National Park, in the north-central region, and the Andromeda Garden, over near the fishing village of Bathsheba, provided some refuge for the harried traveler, although both places attracted picture-snappers hauled out from the hotels in huge air-conditioned buses.

The whole of Bridgetown and the length of the west coast, where the famous white beaches were located, seemed to have been given over entirely to extracting money from foreigners. Bridgetown’s streets were narrow and congested and littered and loud. Hotels lined the beaches hip to hip, and even the sea was crowded—paddleboats, rubber rafts, pirate ships, and hundreds of loudly buzzing Jet Skis, like snowmobiles on water, driven early to late by young Bajan men and boys in wild loops and circles in and around the bathers. Vendors selling trinkets, snow cones, drugs, or sex roved the beaches. Whatever you want, mister, we got it.

We fought off the throng of hustlers and took the first LIAT flight to St. Vincent, where we booked a room at the Grand View
Beach Hotel, fifteen minutes from the E. T. Joshua Airport. True to its name, the hotel was perched on a rocky cliff with a beach below and a grand view—of a Texaco oil tanker pumping its black cargo into storage tanks on the shore just beyond the white sandy beach.

The Grand View Beach Hotel was an old-time English seaside inn—clean, modestly appointed, with the hush of a hospital and a courteous, reticent staff and terrible food. But we welcomed the change. On Barbados it had been impossible to be a traveler; one was forced to be a tourist. On St. Vincent it was easy to be a traveler, but not impossible to be a tourist. The island still possessed its virtue, but, uncertain of its true value, was only a shy flirt. There was one ambitious, large-scale resort hotel called Young Island and several smaller operations trying to expand, but little else in the way of typical tourist accommodations or diversions. Serious change seemed unlikely.

St. Vincent is small, eleven by eighteen miles. With the forty Grenadines and barely 120,000 citizens, it is one of those independent British Commonwealth micronations. Like Dominica, it rises abruptly from the sea to steep lush mountains, with few beaches. It, too, possesses an active volcano named La Soufrière, which, like Martinique’s Mount Pelée, last erupted violently in 1902, killing sixteen hundred people. But now St. Vincent was essentially a quiet, peaceful fishing and agricultural island, exporting coconuts, bananas, and spices by boat from its excellent deepwater port at the capital, Kingstown.

One day we boarded one of those boats, a freighter heading down the Grenadines carrying rum, ax handles, cinder blocks, buckets, push brooms, crates of Glow-Spread margarine, Dole sliced pineapples, and a half-dozen passengers to Bequia. Probably the best way to cruise the Grenadines is by charter sailboat, a mode of transportation that I myself, a nonsailor and an incipient claustrophobe, shirked. I preferred to loaf in the sun on the top deck of an old, fat, dripping freighter chugging its way south, surrounded by talkative Small Islanders wearing their good clothes and new shoes
and shouldering boom boxes for the trip home from St. Vincent, the Big Island.

Bequia and the other Grenadines are a sailor’s dream of the Caribbean—if not mine—come true. It’s all sea and sun and sky; almost no people, almost no land. Bequia is an old boatbuilding and whaling center with a small protected harbor and extensive repair facilities for yachts in Port Elizabeth, the one settlement on the island. In recent years it had become a magnet for scuba divers. There were a few private vacation homes in the hills surrounding the harbor and several laid-back inns and small hotels—this on a strictly barefoot island, seven square miles in area, with forty-five hundred residents. Beyond Bequia, the Grenadines only got smaller, less populated, and casual to the point of seminaked somnolence. Port Elizabeth was about as far as you could go in the group and still find a professionally cooked dinner and fresh coffee and unspoiled wine. From here on, unless you planned to drop in on Princess Margaret or Mick Jagger on Mustique or check into the resort islands of Palm Island or Petit St. Vincent, it was roasted breadfruit, catch of the day, and warm Heineken. Which was fine by us.

On our second day on Bequia, while waiting to catch the freighter back to St. Vincent and our flight from there to Grenada, over lunch at a dockside café Chase brought me back to my account of the decline and fall of my marriage to Becky. It was an unstated clause in Chase’s and my courtship contract, one of my tacitly agreed-upon obligations, that before she and I married, I would explain the end of the three marriages that preceded ours—as if I were applying for a job and needed to explain why I hadn’t lasted in my three previous places of employment. She already knew, perhaps too well, having participated in it herself, the story of the fall of my third marriage following my return to New York from Tuscaloosa. But not the story and causes of its decline, which had presumably preceded and precipitated the fall.