[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
I hope you can stay after the reading
tonight and have some punch and cookies
and tell Richard Elman how wonderful he is.
Our next reading will be one week
from tonight in this auditorium, with visiting poet Bill Knott.
Are you having difficulty hearing me?
No.
We've just put together the third issue of the newsletter.
And we keep getting such wonderful news
about people's accomplishments that we
have to keep stopping and adding things to it.
And if you have any more wonderful news,
give it to me tomorrow and I'll put it in the next issue.
Richard has written too many books for me
to give you the titles of all of them.
I would like to give you the titles of some of the novels.
As you know, he writes fiction, poetry, journalism, essays.
Some of the novels are The Menu Cypher, The Breadfruit
Lotteries, Little Lives, Fredi & Shirl & The Kids,
and Lilo's Diary.
One of the books he's very well known for is--
one of his non-fiction books--
is Cocktails at Somoza's: A Reporter's
Sketchbook of Events in Revolutionary Nicaragua.
In addition to his writings, he's
also well known as a radio personality,
having been one of the regulars on NPR'S All Things Considered
for a long time.
His honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts, a New York State Creative Artist for Public
Service Award, the PEN/ NEA Short Fiction Prize.
He's taught at several universities.
He's been a long-time teacher at the summer program
at Bennington College.
He's taught at Sarah Lawrence College,
State University of New York.
Last year, we were privileged to have him on the faculty here
for one term.
Those of us who heard him read last year
know that you're in for a great treat.
It's a pleasure to introduce Richard Elman.
[APPLAUSE]
This is the important ceremony, the pinning of the lavalier.
I think that's going inside.
OK.
We don't do the kissing with this, doing just the--
Just the pinning.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Try that.
Can you hear me?
I project a little anyway, so.
Well, it's very nice to be here.
It was snowing when I woke up this morning in Stony Brook,
so I'm glad you all came out on a day like this.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read a--
hey, hi-- a few short things.
Some very short things.
Two very short things, and then one thing that's
a little longer.
Two of them are works of fiction.
One's a short short, as we used to say.
One's a real story.
But I'm going to start by reading
something I'm working on now.
They were all things I've been working on recently.
I don't like to read published work.
You can go to the library and find that.
I've been writing my memoirs.
I don't plan to die right away, but I do plan
to write my memoirs.
I've bumped into all kinds of people in my lifetime.
So I thought I'd write a book of memoirs about it.
The title of the book is Namedropping.
Well, I'd be modest.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm going to read the prologue, which is very short.
And it's called "Post Time" as I used to play the horses.
There are a couple of little epigraphs to the book.
I'll read those, too.
Just briefly to get this thing underway.
And I will get you out of here in a reasonable amount of time
There are two little epigraphs to this little prologue,
to this memoir.
One is from a poem that I wrote a long time ago called
"Curriculum Vitae," which about people's resumes.
And the epigraph is, "Our list of references
usually depicts we were once capable of keeping friends."
The other is from a conversation I overheard a few summers back
on the beach in Amagansett, which is one of the Hamptons
out near where I live.
The conversation was-- it's a piece of a conversation,
actually-- a woman or a man was saying--
I'm not even sure which--
quote, "It's Phil Lopate, not Phil Roth.
He's the other Phil.
Or I don't know, maybe it's the other way around."
This is called "Post Time" and it begins with a little poem.
The turf softly raked--
and silences are numerous.
There's the silence of the clock,
of chance incandescent on the tote.
Horses, calm and separate in their stalls,
prepare for sound.
In the course of the same old race,
I find myself writing about some people.
How fame seems to set some people apart from us,
known and considered otherwise in different ways.
I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway's
small, weak handshake and by the jolt of force with which Elie
Wiesel squeezed my hand once.
Of qualities I have known in some, as difficult
to assess as women's smiles.
How long ago seems knowing, too.
When I first met Isaac Singer, he asked me,
who is this Saul Bellow?
Singer's great comic story of faith, "Gimpel the Fool,"
has only recently been published from Yiddish
to English in a translation by Mr. Saul Bellow.
They're both still a long way from Oslo.
His features of a medieval saint even
to the faint, white-haired tantra
effect about the crown of his skull
were backlit by the glowing monitor
from his mischievous incubus.
Not who I was, but who I have known.
My oldest daughter goes to school
for a while in Lake Placid.
Another parent with children at the school is JD Salinger.
Divorced and single part-time fatherhood
have made us comrades at a distance.
You know, when I first got into this business,
I was in graduate school.
I was learning how to be a writer.
I really expected I'd hear wonderful literary
conversations when I met other writers.
Mostly, it was gossip, backbiting, and purchase money
mortgages.
This is one conversation that isn't about gossip
back bite and purchase money.
Anyway.
Once, Salinger and I took Thanksgiving together
at the same long family table at this boarding school.
He was quite a charming, sartorially elegant man
in those days, 15 years ago.
And he didn't seem to mind looking away from his children
a moment to talk about writing.
I asked him once, as we were driving from our inn
to the school in his Jaguar, if the world could expect
another Salinger book someday.
"My book?"
His voice was low, confident, confidential
from the driver's seat where he sat behind the wheel.
"Richard," he said, "it's really nice
not to have to publish anything until the work is really
completed and I'm happy with it."
The last time I saw Salinger, he was hitting ground strokes
on the school courts with his son,
who later became a movie actor.
Did Salinger Sr. ever seemed troubled
by his seeming lack of productivity?
Not in my company, but maybe for TIME magazine.
Nowadays, I'm forced to conclude other people's estimations
of his well-being were of much less consequence to him
than getting proper topspin, showing that
to a son at that moment.
In long tennis whites, he looked a bit
like one of the old champions or another, grayer version,
perhaps, of the Central Park camp counselor who
appears in his early stories.
Who I have sometimes listened to is also important.
"Hey, kiddo," Henry Miller tells me,
when we speak about my writing his life story, which
I've been contracted to do.
"Don't you think you have a hell of a lot of nerve
thinking you could do that?"
[LAUGHTER]
Ralph Ellison tells me once that when he was a young writer,
he resented the writings of James Agee "because," he said,
"Agee wrote about the poverty of poor whites.
And they were the people I thought
who kept my people down."
When Jean-Paul Sartre won the Nobel Prize,
Isaac Singer told me, with all the innocence
of a centerfold spread in Playboy,
"this man, Sartre, he's not such a good writer, is he?"
I say, "I think he probably is," though different, of course,
than Singer.
When I tell this story a few days later to Elie Wiesel,
he says, "oh, that is just Isaac's chutzpah.
He's too arrogant to read Sartre.
And this way, he makes his insistence on not knowing
seem like a reasonable position."
[LAUGHTER]
In those days, Wiesel and Singer were both still writing
for the Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward.
The collegiality of these two future Nobel laureates
was largely a matter of backbite.
The poet John Ashbery and I met once
in front of his apartment building
in Chelsea on a hot summer day.
I was just getting off my bike to run an errand.
He invited me up to his place for a cool drink.
Some weeks later, we exchanged books.
I gave him my autobiography, Fredi & Shirl & The Kids.
He gave me A Nest of Ninnies, which he wrote
with the poet James Schuyler.
We sit together on couches in his comfortable though somewhat
frumpy living room, as though divided by opposite sides
of a big white picket fence.
I tell him I admire his poetry of time
as a sort of white noise a lot.
He tells me that as an almost unknown in Paris,
he also had to do a lot of hack work.
Crime stories, art crit, some porn,
I believe, sometimes under assumed names.
Under assumed names, both poets have chosen at times
to be fugitives.
I learned the limits of literary friendliness
one summer at Yaddo, a writer's sanctuary in Saratoga.
I was sitting by the pool, sunbathing
after a morning of writing, when the critic Alfred Kazin dropped
his big, heavy medicine ball right on my stomach.
I lost my breath.
Surely, it was all an accident?
To prove it was not, Mr. Kazin took
a deep breath, picked up his ball again, tucked in his gut,
and then dropped 25 more pounds of leather
down on my stomach again.
"Look, Alfred," I said.
"What's the matter?" he replied.
"Can't you take it?"
"What's the matter with Elman over there?
He's certainly not being very friendly, is he?"
I heard Kaz--
Kazin's septum deviating over dinner that night
from another table.
The poet Jean Garrigue explained to me at dessert
that Alfred had always been very shy.
Dropping the ball was just his way of making friends.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a book about some famous and accomplished people
I have known over a long time, and some less well,
in the course of my career as a working writer.
So that's the prologue.
The next thing I'm going to read is a short story, very short.
What we call a short short, I guess.
Short, short.
This is the a story from a collection of stories
I've been writing for some time called "Disco Frito," which
means fried discotheque.
It's set in Nicaragua in 1978, '79, '80, '81, '82, '83.
I was going there up until about '84.
This story is something I witnessed myself.
But I've also had any number of Nicaraguans
tell me stories like this.
And it's because of that I decided finally
to make a little scene, a little short story out of it.
It's called "Loving Strangers."
In the middle of the night, he heard a blabbering loud voice,
crying out voice, which tore him from sleep.
He went to the window and peered down into the darkened street.
Footsteps slapped the pavement.
Metal jiggled as though someone were getting off,
ready to fire off something.
He looked directly below just as a dark figure
ran across his vision.
"Who is it?
What are you doing?"
Ismelda asked from her slumber next to him.
"It must be the police again," Salvador said, "of the militia.
They couldn't be so far south."
"I don't understand you."
She was sitting up in the bed, draped inside the bed clothes.
"The insurgents," he pointed out.
"I thought it could be one of them."
"You mean the enemy?"
Her voice carried with it a correction.
"The enemy," he repeated her words.
"Simeon," she added softly, calling him by a love name.
"Come back to bed."
Gunfire blasted against a wall.
"Simeon, back to bed," she said.
He turned away from the window in a crouch.
"It could be thieves," he shrugged at her softly.
"Come back to bed."
"He ran right in front of our door.
He could be somebody we know."
"We don't know anybody anymore, " she reminded him.
"Come away.
Come now."
He climbed in beside her and reached for her body.
She allowed him to draw her close.
"Mano," she said, like a friend.
"You have to watch yourself close all the time.
This isn't your fight."
She stroked his hair and then his back with her hands.
"People are dying all the time of strokes, too, you know,"
she laughed at him softly.
When he kissed her dark warm shoulder,
she sighed and pulled her gown below his avid mouth.
He smelled beef when it's freshly slaughtered.
She kissed his face and slid backwards against the pillows.
All the time in the dark streets, a man
was flushed from one hiding place to another.
There were cries, more shots.
When he entered her, she cried out
just as automatic rifle fire exploded two blocks away
in the Indian marketplace.
The main portion of this reading is this fairly--
well, it's not that long.
It's a story, new story I've written,
which is nothing much I can tell you about it.
So I'll just read it.
It's called "Almonds with the Children of Long Bay."
Long Bay is a little town in the Caribbean.
The water gleamed like burnt oil.
Burnt without flames.
It gave off its fumes to the still air, almost black,
splotched dark blue, banded close to shore
with the gray, purple shadows from palm and almond trees,
surging gently inland from the surf's mile movements.
The beach at Long Bay was like something thrown down
suddenly against the water: behind a narrow violet
strip of sand, sparkling here and there,
a number of pistachio, lemon, and stark white bungalows
blinked among the palms in one direction; a glance down
the other end of the cove showed a wreckage
of shacks, flotsam of chicken coops,
battered old cars, beach dories.
Seated in the center of the cove,
on a piece of beach five foot from the water's edge,
George Kendril felt protected.
The sky was this perfect untroubled Caribbean azure,
and the lowest inklings of the Blue Hills
which began at the farthest end of the beach,
though lush with cultivations, seemed
like stage flats erected, if he ever glanced heavenward,
to ensure the privacy of his good moods.
Kendril was dressed solely in white gym shorts.
No longer red, he was brownish, orangey, peeling,
with bare long legs and big feet that
were resting only a little lower than his perfectly wide moonish
grin.
He wore no sunglasses.
For some minutes, he felt at peace with himself
in the world, very calm and very still.
But after surveying all the hairy trails and arroyos
on his chest, his softly swelling belly,
he cracked his face and neck slightly up
in a squint of that blinding hot sun
to watch the five small Black children again climbing
among the branches of the tallest
almond tree and the patio of the nearly abandoned motel
where he'd been staying for more than a week.
The children were after nuts, just like yesterday.
A scattering of shells and half rotted hulls
stained and pocked the flagstones
beneath that one great broad-leafed tree
which was still quite overladen, ready for harvesting.
On the second day of their attack against the almond tree,
the children were clearly not playing.
They wanted food.
They were hungry.
They worked over each limb and branch
with a desperate joyfulness, one climbing monkey-like
along the boughs and shaking, and the four others harvesting.
And they took turns up high, the others leaving small mounds
at the foot of the tree.
After a while, more than one child
would be up among the branches, raining down nuts
at the feet of the others.
Kendril observed they did not often
stop to eat any of their precious harvest.
As soon as a new rain of nuts fell,
they were sorted and swept into those little mounds
or else gathered among the faded upturned skirts of two
little girls, about 8 and 10, who ran about beneath the tree
with their brothers and their friends, their bellies bulging,
their bare scrawny thighs agleam.
Very little was said, though there was a lot of laughter.
And an occasional command given in Creole
from an older sister of the gang, tall, loose, really quite
handsome, a grown woman who stood some paces away,
smoking at a thick hand-rolled cigarette.
When she was not supervising the kids in the tree,
she would glance shyly up at Kendril,
and then look away again, as if not
wishing him to know she was interested in him.
He thought she was very attractive--
the high brow, the long sculptured face,
those loose limbs, warm, dark skin,
her full breasts beneath a thin sketchy black house dress.
The thought that she was probably not wearing anything
under her dress also excited him.
He was more than just curious about her
and the children, drawn to her handsome good looks,
but unable to engage the young woman in an open flirtation,
he turned back toward Janine, his traveling companion.
"Nice," he sighed, and stretched out his legs.
"Oh, fun and game," she smiled back.
She wore a light blue silk bikini.
She had boyishly cropped sandy hair, bright blue eyes,
pretty bird-like aplomb.
Seated in a beach chair identical to his own
perhaps 10 paces apart, when she was not
trying to attract him to be more than simply his companion,
Janine could be quite custodial with Kendril.
Now she asked, "Hungry?"
He continued to stare at her, so pretty
and clean without a hair out of place, well-groomed, trim.
Good bones, slim ankles, fine, well bred, all knowing.
She obviously enjoyed being pleasant toward him whenever
he let it be, as though her question to him
now was an irrelevance he could disregard, though
not her smiling.
"Are you hungry?" she asked again
in the exact same tone of voice, raising a plastic glass
of pink rum punch to her face, tilting up her chin,
draining it all the way to the bottom, before smiling again.
He shook his head.
"Are you?"
He felt he was being appeasing, slightly cowardly.
Ever since he'd noticed the Black woman three days ago,
he could barely bring himself to look at Janine openly
in daylight, her overseeing presence.
He was also ashamed somewhat, aware
she knew what was going on and would never say anything
to him about it directly.
But now, she spoke to him with just a little pout of the lips.
"Those children aren't just playing, George.
They're hungry, real hungry."
Was she emphasizing that last phrase with the vernacular
to warn him of something?
Discourage him perhaps?
Kendril didn't like being so closely supervised,
but he knew talk would be less threatening to her than more
silence at this point.
"One would think so," he observed,
as if a little too blithely, stuffy from exposure
to the sun.
"Do you suppose big sister said fetch me some nuts for supper
or there'll be no supper?"
"She might be their mother," Janine advised.
"She's old enough."
"Oh, do you think so?"
He was really angry with her, and hoped
she was trying to convince herself as well
as him by being so catty.
Frowning back at him a little fearfully,
Janine said, "I don't need to tell you they get pregnant
very young down here."
"I know that, but not that young.
I mean, so many times," he said.
"She couldn't be.
She's just much too young, too slim and pretty."
There.
His attraction was published for both of them to hear and edit.
"You do like her, don't you?"
Janine said.
Kendril didn't want to feel himself blush.
He resisted the feeling without knowing
what was happening to his face.
"Well, don't defend her," Janine said, turning away,
annoyed, after a while.
"Because I really wasn't attacking her."
She was staring down the beach toward the cabanas
and he found himself counting hairs again on his chest.
"Never mind," he said.
"Just let's forget it."
"That's fine with me."
The surf sashayed.
The cries of the children were feverish a moment.
A shadow crossed his lap, as if his head had sunk on him a bit.
The branches of the almond tree shook
and swayed once more, wildly.
Kendril saw two more of the children ascend the trunk
and then the topmost part of the tree
seemed to bend under all their pulling weight
so that their guardian, and one little girl left on the ground,
began to shout at them in Creole some words of caution.
He thought it sounded like, see the waveys,
couldn't make out their exact words.
but the woman's voice came very loud and harsh and throaty,
without any lilt to it.
And that disabused him of some of his fantasy about her
for the moment.
The climber nearest the ground descended.
A few nuts fell, too.
And he again squinted off toward the ocean.
Janine rose from her chair.
She tugged at her panties and walked over
to the ruffled water's edge, seeming
very birdlike and necky when her toes touched the water
and she wiggled them.
"Lovely."
She seemed to make song: bent herself low over the waves
and adjusted her straps, with the cup of her right hand
splashed at her shoulders here small round breasts.
She splashed herself again and again
and cooed and giggled and sighed.
She was putting on such a good show.
She liked being watched.
She was an actress.
She wanted George to look at her and never look away.
But really, that was not part of the rules
they'd made in advance on coming to this island together
and she knew it, and, in a little while,
stopped and held her head up high
and was necky and pouted when she saw George gazing off
into space again.
"Really?" he wanted to say.
"You're being so childish, being such a little girl."
But he followed the movements out of the corners of his eyes
and said nothing because he knew the woman and those children
were still hanging about and might overhear.
Had it not been more or less mutually decided
upon with Janine that they would travel together as friends,
chums, eat together, of course sleep together, but just not
get too involved.
"Let's just try to have some fun together for a while,"
Kendril could remember hearing himself, more than once,
"for a change.
I think we can both use that."
"Of course, some fun.
That would be nice."
He never agreed to notice her moods.
The sex had been good together, the air of their company
bright and easy.
She seemed as content as he believed he was.
But in the Capitol, their first night,
she almost went off with a handsome Black hustler
who promised to show her the best reggae and street dancing
and some dynamite high green.
"You know beauty.
Real spliffs."
George felt tight and abused by the invitation
to turn on without him as he watched it transpire,
and Janine not resisting, that he became openly angry
and ordered her not to go.
"I just don't like feeling left out," he explained later.
"Bump on a log."
George meant he didn't want their holds to be quite that
loose, though he did not have to be possessive because he had
a sort of unwritten title to Janine's attention, squatter's
rights, for the duration of their trips.
They'd rented a car to drive out to Long Bay
and then the thing between them heated up.
Among the coconut groves and sugar fields of Moro Bay,
it was hard to resist being with such a pretty available woman.
They made love on beaches, bathed naked
near deserted coconut plantations,
were with each other. and honestly happy for a while,
except as soon as they were back on the road,
he retreated from her again.
His excuse was his fear of getting
lost in a strange part of the island.
He also wanted to draw back, he thought,
with some self-loathing, having once again
established his rights to her.
Now he blinked at her coldly near the water's edge
at Long Bay.
"You'll be swimming again, I suppose."
"If you will."
She smiled toward him.
Ever since Moro Bay, she'd been guarded with him like that.
Her attentions toward him, a weak pulse,
were constant, debilitating.
Kendril found her come-ons more disagreeable than enticing.
He said, "I'd like to sit here and watch those kids, you know.
I may even sketch them after a while."
"In that case," she said, as she gave
an annoyed peck at all that pure bright air
with her pretty head, "I think I'll
take myself a little stroll down the beach."
She went off through the sand, across the breakwater,
toward the inn.
"Be sure to be back by 5:00," he called after her.
They were planning to drive to Port Antonio for dinner,
though he didn't explain, as if hoping she did not
need to be reminded.
Janine never turned around but waved
through the air, a slim arm held high,
sauntering on, very sidling, provocative,
as if cooling herself down in the wind.
Watching her diminishing form negotiate
the rows of small private bungalows
to enter the crowded public beach near the inn,
he felt slightly peeved again by what
seemed another reproach intended for him.
Then the anger died.
He was grateful just to be by himself.
He could just be good to himself for a while.
Gradually, he let his head rise from his shoulders,
felt the tension leaving his neck,
and then he heard the children rustling in their tree,
and turned and saw that they and their guardian
had also stopped what they were doing
to watch Janine's departure.
There was a sudden almost syrupy hot thickness
to the air about his face.
They were all smiling at George.
One of the little girls was bouncing up and down
on a bare heels, squealing joyfully.
Then the others began to bounce and make happy sounds,
teasing sounds.
"Now shah," said their guardian, as if she
knew that she was their target.
But the children quieted only for a moment.
They all seem so very pleased for Kendril and their relative,
now that he was alone at last.
Slowly, dropping their legs down under them
like large spiders, the two eldest children
descended from different branches of the tree
and fell and rolled about and giggled.
There was a little applause, and then a lot of panic.
The smallest little girl had gotten her skirt
snagged on a branch so that she was more or less hanging
in peril.
Kendril got up from his chair.
He saw the woman gracefully extend her long arms
and on tiptoes grabbed the little girl's bottom and yank
her out of the tree.
She bent over the child to ask if she'd been hurt.
Wildly, the girl shook her head.
She whispered, pulled herself away
from the woman, who was pointing around
a corner of one of the old buildings.
The child walked to a place near where the woman pointed
and in full view of Kendril lifted her skirts and squatted,
a stream of dirty colored water gushing from her bottom.
When the child was done, the woman
gathered all of her children near
and they started to walk toward Kendril
with some of their nuts.
"Good day to you, sir."
"Good day.
Lovely, isn't it," he beamed back at them,
though at first he was somewhat frightened
by so many bright faces, happy faces.
They seemed like a reproach to his customary sense of dread
and they were so easy in their beauty toward him.
When they offered some nuts out of their little pink palms
for him to share with them, Kendril
worried about taking food from hungry mouths.
But the woman, who surely must be their mother,
from the broad nosed family resemblance, he now
observed up close, gave him such positive encouragement
with a nodding warm smile.
He was infatuated with all of them once again.
"Take.
Please take," she was saying.
"You'll make the children very happy.
And you'll like, if you take."
Her smile was broad.
It broke against her high dun cheekbones, crinkled her eyes,
showed her handsome pink mouth, almost toothless.
She saw he was pleased with her, and she was pleased
for being handsome to him.
"I assure you, sir, you will like."
"No sir," Kendril said.
"George."
"All right, sir.
My name is Barbara.
Take," she insisted.
He took a nut, and the children cheered.
"Patrick, Lally, Sheela, Marcus, this is Mr. George."
She had rattled off her children's names
with so much familiar insouciance
that Kendril could not locate faces as they answered to them.
Though each child seemed to be smiling
when his or her name was called, he
realized they'd all been smiling at him for quite a long while.
Kendril heard himself mumbling at a collection
of smiling yams.
"How do you do?
George.
George Kendril.
George."
"Three cheers for George!
We're all just fine," she told him then.
"But please, you must take more.
Take another.
We picked for you."
Kendril accepted a second nut and crushed
the two between his fingers easily,
their hard scaly rinds yielding so readily
to the pressure of his thumbs that two shiny white pips,
about the size of his cuticles, almost slipped from his palms
before he was able to push them up toward his mouth
and chew on them, studiously.
The fruit was salty, and then sweet,
a slightly bitter greenish taste.
"Good?"
All the children were screaming at him at once.
"Good?"
"Good as a gennip," he blinked back.
They giggled and bounced up and down again, delighted he knew
the names of one of their favorite local fruits.
Then he heard the woman's voice, and it was rather soft and deep
and thrilling to him, but just a little more schooled
and English in its accent.
"Really," Barbara was saying, "they are delighted for you."
He felt as if she was counting herself out.
"For what?"
"We all are," she said.
"That you like."
Smiling so warmly toward him again, that he felt
drawn to touch her.
He wanted to reach for her, felt he already
knew her in ways he had never known or trusted Janine.
"Well, I certainly must return the favor,"
Kendril said suddenly.
He got up out of his chair so that the soles of his bare feet
were burning against the new sand.
"Come with me," he announced, and started up
the beach toward the porch of his bungalow.
Once, as he led this small procession of children
and their handsome guardian, Kendril
couldn't resist glancing off to the direction in which Janine
had gone away.
But he did not see her figure among the bathers
nor was she off somewhere beyond the public beach
that he could perceive, where the cove bent in upon itself
under low hills of banana, papaya, and coconut
cultivations.
When he reached the wooden porch steps,
he turned and said to Barbara and her children,
"Make yourself comfortable here.
Just wait, and I'll be right back."
He went inside to find the big fruit bowl.
He had Gros Michel bananas for them
and soursops, green and yellow mangoes, star apples,
and heavy sprays of the lime green gennip.
When he came outside with that big flowered bowl heaped high
with fruits, proffered between his outreaching arms,
he felt himself also brimming.
In the bright glare, the faces of all the children
dulled on him then, as though they really
did not expect immediate reimbursement
for their gift of a few nuts to this nice friendly person.
But he thought he was being generous.
They could have all they wanted and there would surely
be plenty leftover for Janine with whom he bought the fruits.
"Take," Kendril echoed their words.
"Do take."
Then Barbara said, "It's all right to take."
All their faces brightened.
An octopus reached for his bowl of ripe fruit.
Now all of them sat about on the porch,
eating the fruits and nuts noisily,
wetly, making large sucking noises.
Only Kendril lacked much appetite.
He worried there wouldn't be enough for everybody.
The children and their mother seemed ravenous.
They gladly reached for seconds and thirds.
The piled-up fruit in his bowl dwindled.
He believed he was happy in the sun
to be giving these people so much enjoyment.
When there was only just one mango and a couple of gennips
left in the bowl, Barbara noticed a paperback copy
of a novel on the porch and picked it up
and started rippling through its pages,
almost blindly, with her sticky fingers.
Her face was gleaming.
"You are a professor?"
"Artist," he explained.
"I sometimes paint."
He brushed at the air between them
with his right hand, a rather grand flourish
of brushes and strokes.
"Oh," she giggled, showing her bare pink gums to him
again as her face broke into another smile.
"You're famous?"
"Not at all, not really," he blushed.
"Yes, sir, I believe you are," she
insisted, and went ooh again before jabbering a few words
at the children, which also made them go ooh,
as if delighted with him.
Kendril, for lack of any more appropriate response,
brushed at the air again.
Barbara oohed at him a third time, and now she too darkened.
He could see the crimson rush against her brown skin,
stretched tight across those cheekbones,
so that it seemed to him, momentarily,
his own feeling for her was being reflected back
against his face.
His ears burned.
Bashful, he cast his glance down at his feet once more.
"I came here to have a vacation," he declared,
"and it's been lovely.
But someday, soon, I may want to draw all of you
because I think you're all so very nice and very pretty."
"Thank you so much," said the littlest of the girls.
The others were giggling again.
Barbara said, "Yes, you must come to visit with us.
Then you can draw us."
"Another time maybe."
"Oh, we live very close," she said.
"You come with us.
Now.
The children will like that.
Won't you, children?"
"Not today."
He felt tight all over again.
"Oh yes, you must."
"He should.
He must," the children said.
"But I can't today.
I'm waiting for my friend."
"You come," Barbara seemed a little gruff.
"You'll like it.
Come."
He glanced across his shoulder down the beach
and felt a warm hand grasp his wrist.
He shrugged her off.
"I'm very sorry."
She drew back her hand.
There was a sort of hurt in her eyes.
Now he knew he'd been drawn to her by something in her, too.
An eternity of mutual melancholy he might have ended here
at last, if only he had not hurt himself
so much now by rejecting her.
"My friend, she would notice I'd gone away, wasn't here,"
Kendril explained, "and she would miss me."
"You mean the lady?"
All the children gasped and jawed at him.
"Yes, I came with her.
She's my friend."
"But we were friends," Barbara nodded glumly,
and the children all gathered around her.
They were all looking very sad.
"The man don't wish to come, for sure,"
Barbara shouted crossly down the beach.
"Don't you hear the man?"
"Some other time," Kendril was saying.
"Perhaps tomorrow.
If you tell me where you live, I could come."
He knew the effort was futile.
They all started to walk away in a single file.
"Goodbye, sir.
Bye," waving at him as if he were a moth or a bug a fly,
their heads cast dejectedly against their shoulders.
"Goodbye."
Kendril watched their procession along the beach
the opposite way Janine had gone.
When they disappeared behind the row of shanties
near Mama Kelty's store, he felt relieved,
he'd no more fruits to offer.
He went to the icebox and got himself
a bottle of Dragon Stout, cold and very bitter
against his teeth.
His face felt like a big hot stone.
Kendril stayed alone on his porch
all that afternoon, feeling himself
as heavy, unalterable and heavy and leaden, sad.
Light glinted dully on the lavender beach.
Another improbably bright day was leaving him.
The tide came in.
He felt abandoned, or that he had missed out
on a chance to defy death by becoming involved with such
a band of strangers, that his body was not
a grievance against his mind.
And when the warm winds blew, he felt just bleary misery.
Janine reappeared at dusk, a rather thin smudge at first.
Her figure enlarged as it alternated
with the palms along some nearby nearly deserted stretches
of beach.
"Hello there," she said cheerily, at last,
three feet from the lowest porch step.
"Been having yourself a party?"
Her eyes took in shreds of mango and papaya pits,
stems, skins, a bottle around the desolated fruit bowl.
Her face seemed very burned and crisp and sere,
her nose much to red.
And there were reddish smudge marks
all along her shoulders and rib cage.
She was sweating.
"Well," Janine said a moment later,
"I'm glad you saved something for me.
I guess I'll go and shower."
"Janine."
He was trying to stop her because she
was being much too mean.
This simply couldn't be another reproach.
The woman wiped a hand across her face
and left herself with a smile.
"I see you didn't get to sketch you after all."
"Have you been with someone?"
Kendril demanded.
She smiled on.
"Of course."
She started up the porch through the sliding glass doors
into their bungalow.
He followed her.
He watched her undoing herself.
He thought he could detect more red marks.
He said, "Janine."
"Now, George."
She spun about so that she seemed scrawny,
though resilient, her look determined, her mood bolstered
by her afternoon away from him.
"Don't you start anything," she warned.
"I mean it.
I really won't stand for it."
The fist of anger in him unclenched.
He felt warm again, despite himself.
He smiled.
He felt evil and very sexy, and felt quite good, and then
guilty as hell about all that.
"I'm not going to split hairs with you, Janine."
His voice was a slur, a leer.
"Hurry, because I'm feeling real lonely."
Her face was an almost blank.
"I'll just pop under the shower, George."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Are there any questions?
Or I guess we can talk later.
[CHATTER]