as suffering from “adrenal exhaustion.” Expensive new term for infidelity, Jean thought as she grimly wrote out her check—noting, with additional chagrin, that there wasn’t even a word for the female cuckold.
Although she could give up wheat as instructed, and avoid the Internet café, she couldn’t stop following, obsessively in her mind, this thread that seemed to be leading her deeper into and not out of the labyrinth. It was only an enforced interruption that broke the spell, and that interruption was Phyllis.
J ean’s mother had invited herself to stay—and Jean, generous at a distance of nine thousand miles, had encouraged her. Maybe it was her new loneliness, but she wanted to see Phyllis; surely she could refrain from childish flare-ups—generally provoked, after all, by Phyllis’s criticism of Mark.
With Mark away she began to make plans for the visit. She imagined long walks on the beach. And then what? She’d take her mother to the old rum distillery that was now a museum. They’d go to the famous botanical garden, which Jean had yet to visit, and to the Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center, where there was that kestrel project she’d read about in Le Quotidien. A delegation of British and American bird lovers was attempting to boost a depleted population of kestrels—they were down to four pairs when the center opened. They finger-fed them prekilled mice; they incubated their eggs, and, in time, they would reintroduce them into their ancestral habitat in the St. Jacques jungle, itself shrinking and in urgent need of conservation.
The Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center: like the Beausoleil Hotel, only more literal, Jean thought. (She’d been trying to shape a column about the well-known if hard-to-prove link between foreign holidays and fertility.) She drove around to see if she could get Phyllis day passes to the big hotels, where she would be pampered and entertained. She could see why tourists didn’t want to leave the expensively irrigated grounds, where they spent a week or two nearly naked, adding only a ribbon around the hips for meals, and where even the swimming pools were saronglike, wrapped around semisubmerged pool bars.
Then there were all those coupons to get through: the step classes and the spinning sessions, the beach buffet and poolside cocktails, the moonlit ride on the banana boat and the dawn freestyle kite surf, the all-island steel-band competition and the Kiddy Klub Karaoke Kontest, the limbo, the bingo, the rumba, the rummy, and of course the room service—the in-house Cecils and Cedrics, the Rangoolams and Rishabs, the towel boys and waiters, the lifeguards and fitness coaches and, first among men, the deep-sea-diving instructors, including Aminata’s hunky son Amadou. This, anyway, was the picture Jean got from Aminata, with her many eyes and ears on the island, each with the perspective of a different uniform. And even if Jean sometimes bristled, it was a view that tallied with her emerging expectation of universal depravity. If Mark was in on it, why not everyone else?
She had to ask Amadou if it was safe for older people to dive; Phyllis would love the carnival colors of the coral reef, the fetal weightlessness of the aquanaut, the reassuring presence of a broad-shouldered guide like Amadou, part-time Poseidon, blue-lit sea husband. She laughed to think of her mother in a tiny wetsuit and a cat’s-eyes mask, her flippers with kitten heels. When she finally tracked Amadou down between diving trips out to the reef, he reassured her that the only clients warned off were those who were pregnant or who suspected they might be. Women guests apparently came into the category of baggage everyone was always having to account for.And suddenly, Jean thought, the hitherto mind-numbing airport query “Did you pack this bag yourself?” gained fresh poetry and meaning. Abass, another of Aminata’s sons, worked at customs, and Jean had heard how the best-looking girls were
Although she could give up wheat as instructed, and avoid the Internet café, she couldn’t stop following, obsessively in her mind, this thread that seemed to be leading her deeper into and not out of the labyrinth. It was only an enforced interruption that broke the spell, and that interruption was Phyllis.
J ean’s mother had invited herself to stay—and Jean, generous at a distance of nine thousand miles, had encouraged her. Maybe it was her new loneliness, but she wanted to see Phyllis; surely she could refrain from childish flare-ups—generally provoked, after all, by Phyllis’s criticism of Mark.
With Mark away she began to make plans for the visit. She imagined long walks on the beach. And then what? She’d take her mother to the old rum distillery that was now a museum. They’d go to the famous botanical garden, which Jean had yet to visit, and to the Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center, where there was that kestrel project she’d read about in Le Quotidien. A delegation of British and American bird lovers was attempting to boost a depleted population of kestrels—they were down to four pairs when the center opened. They finger-fed them prekilled mice; they incubated their eggs, and, in time, they would reintroduce them into their ancestral habitat in the St. Jacques jungle, itself shrinking and in urgent need of conservation.
The Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center: like the Beausoleil Hotel, only more literal, Jean thought. (She’d been trying to shape a column about the well-known if hard-to-prove link between foreign holidays and fertility.) She drove around to see if she could get Phyllis day passes to the big hotels, where she would be pampered and entertained. She could see why tourists didn’t want to leave the expensively irrigated grounds, where they spent a week or two nearly naked, adding only a ribbon around the hips for meals, and where even the swimming pools were saronglike, wrapped around semisubmerged pool bars.
Then there were all those coupons to get through: the step classes and the spinning sessions, the beach buffet and poolside cocktails, the moonlit ride on the banana boat and the dawn freestyle kite surf, the all-island steel-band competition and the Kiddy Klub Karaoke Kontest, the limbo, the bingo, the rumba, the rummy, and of course the room service—the in-house Cecils and Cedrics, the Rangoolams and Rishabs, the towel boys and waiters, the lifeguards and fitness coaches and, first among men, the deep-sea-diving instructors, including Aminata’s hunky son Amadou. This, anyway, was the picture Jean got from Aminata, with her many eyes and ears on the island, each with the perspective of a different uniform. And even if Jean sometimes bristled, it was a view that tallied with her emerging expectation of universal depravity. If Mark was in on it, why not everyone else?
She had to ask Amadou if it was safe for older people to dive; Phyllis would love the carnival colors of the coral reef, the fetal weightlessness of the aquanaut, the reassuring presence of a broad-shouldered guide like Amadou, part-time Poseidon, blue-lit sea husband. She laughed to think of her mother in a tiny wetsuit and a cat’s-eyes mask, her flippers with kitten heels. When she finally tracked Amadou down between diving trips out to the reef, he reassured her that the only clients warned off were those who were pregnant or who suspected they might be. Women guests apparently came into the category of baggage everyone was always having to account for.And suddenly, Jean thought, the hitherto mind-numbing airport query “Did you pack this bag yourself?” gained fresh poetry and meaning. Abass, another of Aminata’s sons, worked at customs, and Jean had heard how the best-looking girls were
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