whisked straight through immigration. Taxi drivers had two decisive advantages over rival predators: they were boys with cars and, like the crew on a cruise liner, they got first dibs. If Aminata’s family covered the full arc of experience on St. Jacques, her daughter Aissatou, a nurse at the hospital, stood at the dead end of the rainbow and witnessed the rising incidence of venereal disease: old-fashioned ailment, new kind of holiday souvenir.
Driving back from Amadou’s hotel, Jean wondered if it was possible to write about the health hazards of sexual liberation without sounding 102. Wedding and honeymoon packages were standard offerings at all the big hotels, but some catered to singles—the young and not-so-young Western women on the party trail. Frantically carefree, they crammed it in before they got down to worrying about their own weddings. On the way home, she stopped in at the salon.
Aminata—who trimmed Jean’s hair as her part of the Phyllis preparations—told her all about the wild Brits and mostly Australians. Salon gossip had always been a source of uncomplicated fascination for Jean, but now, with her head uncomfortably tilted back and worrying about damage to the nerve roots leading from the spinal cord (she’d once written a column about this, salon-sink radiculopathy), she found she no longer wanted to know about sexual misadventure. She certainly didn’t want to hear Aminata’s equally airy excuses for female genital cutting or polygamy; she’d grown intolerant of her relentless disdain for tourists, which, at times, was hard to distinguish from plain racism. She had to stop herself from telling Aminata to rein in her rampaging sons instead of slandering the girls they screwed—the same girls she overcharged, sometimes the same day.
But she regretted this new rigidity in herself. She wanted to keep her lively friend and contact, and she wanted to be able to bring Phyllis to the salon; she’d be charmed by her. She’d remind her, as she had Jean, of their beloved housekeeper from the sixties and seventies, Gladys Williams from South Carolina, whose own hairstyle was a shiny black helmet of a wig. And Phyllis would love the little salon itself, with its flowerstenciled pink walls and matching rose sink sets.
About the office-house Jean had no doubt: her mother would hate it. She’d look around and think they’d moved here to save money. In fact, Jean had been so enchanted by the former mining office, with the filigree portico of a Victorian railroad station and its rows of rattan benches, she’d immediately decided to buy it. But now she saw it with her mother’s eyes: potholes running the length of the drive; broken paving stones; cracked plaster walls green with mildew; a net of creepers engulfing most of the building; the tin roof giving a standing ovation whenever the rain rattled down.
For Jean that sound—the amplified downpour—was forever charged with afternoon lovemaking, occasioned solely by the luck, their first day in the house, of being caught inside rather than out during a thunderstorm, knowing that no one would bother them for as long as it lasted. This uproarious greeting had cheered them just as they’d finished dragging in all the boxes and duffels—it made them feel both actively dry and safely home. In obeisance to these promising new household gods, they’d immediately sought the still-sheetless four-poster moored in an alcove deep in the Bureau du Directeur.
Afterward, Mark had run out into the soft and steady rain to pick a mango they’d been amazed to spot through the window. They couldn’t find a knife and so had bitten into the extravagantlyscented flesh, its “skin like a sunset,” as he put it. Then they held their faces out the window, straight into the rain, to wash away the juice. And they felt more than cleansed. It was just then, Jean thought heavily, that they’d first called the office, and by extension the entire island, the good
Driving back from Amadou’s hotel, Jean wondered if it was possible to write about the health hazards of sexual liberation without sounding 102. Wedding and honeymoon packages were standard offerings at all the big hotels, but some catered to singles—the young and not-so-young Western women on the party trail. Frantically carefree, they crammed it in before they got down to worrying about their own weddings. On the way home, she stopped in at the salon.
Aminata—who trimmed Jean’s hair as her part of the Phyllis preparations—told her all about the wild Brits and mostly Australians. Salon gossip had always been a source of uncomplicated fascination for Jean, but now, with her head uncomfortably tilted back and worrying about damage to the nerve roots leading from the spinal cord (she’d once written a column about this, salon-sink radiculopathy), she found she no longer wanted to know about sexual misadventure. She certainly didn’t want to hear Aminata’s equally airy excuses for female genital cutting or polygamy; she’d grown intolerant of her relentless disdain for tourists, which, at times, was hard to distinguish from plain racism. She had to stop herself from telling Aminata to rein in her rampaging sons instead of slandering the girls they screwed—the same girls she overcharged, sometimes the same day.
But she regretted this new rigidity in herself. She wanted to keep her lively friend and contact, and she wanted to be able to bring Phyllis to the salon; she’d be charmed by her. She’d remind her, as she had Jean, of their beloved housekeeper from the sixties and seventies, Gladys Williams from South Carolina, whose own hairstyle was a shiny black helmet of a wig. And Phyllis would love the little salon itself, with its flowerstenciled pink walls and matching rose sink sets.
About the office-house Jean had no doubt: her mother would hate it. She’d look around and think they’d moved here to save money. In fact, Jean had been so enchanted by the former mining office, with the filigree portico of a Victorian railroad station and its rows of rattan benches, she’d immediately decided to buy it. But now she saw it with her mother’s eyes: potholes running the length of the drive; broken paving stones; cracked plaster walls green with mildew; a net of creepers engulfing most of the building; the tin roof giving a standing ovation whenever the rain rattled down.
For Jean that sound—the amplified downpour—was forever charged with afternoon lovemaking, occasioned solely by the luck, their first day in the house, of being caught inside rather than out during a thunderstorm, knowing that no one would bother them for as long as it lasted. This uproarious greeting had cheered them just as they’d finished dragging in all the boxes and duffels—it made them feel both actively dry and safely home. In obeisance to these promising new household gods, they’d immediately sought the still-sheetless four-poster moored in an alcove deep in the Bureau du Directeur.
Afterward, Mark had run out into the soft and steady rain to pick a mango they’d been amazed to spot through the window. They couldn’t find a knife and so had bitten into the extravagantlyscented flesh, its “skin like a sunset,” as he put it. Then they held their faces out the window, straight into the rain, to wash away the juice. And they felt more than cleansed. It was just then, Jean thought heavily, that they’d first called the office, and by extension the entire island, the good
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