Via Dolorosa
by Ronald Malfi
Copyright © 2006 by Ronald Malfi
[Smashwords Edition]
Abattoir Press
www.abattoirpress.com
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Also by Ronald Malfi
Novels
The Space Between
The Fall of Never
The Nature of Monsters
Passenger
Shamrock Alley
Snow
The Ascent
Cradle Lake
Floating Staircase
The Narrows
Novellas
The Stranger
The Separation
Skullbelly
Borealis
―Chapter I―
They stayed at the Paradis d’Hôtel, and it was a magnificent hotel. Pushed back and hidden in the shade of the black and wet trees and resting along the white, banded cusp of sand, it sat and looked out upon the dark and silent sea. It was a large hotel, but still somewhat quaint, with a roof of red shale and a naturally stained Roystonea fence surrounding the circular gravel drive. Out back, extending the length of the hotel and facing a vast, rolling slope of lawn, was a stone veranda, pressed cool and firm to the ground beneath a sprawling, slate-shingled arcade. The lawns themselves were brightly green and handsomely manicured, the grass as soft and as fine as down. In preparation for the cicadas, saplings were draped in cheesecloth and sprayed with repellant. Agaves, long and green and thinly-stalked, swayed out by the pools. The air was mostly still but when the breeze came, it came smelling of the sea, and it came with an assuredness that could only come from a place that was uncorrupted by man, far out in the wide and open sea.
For the first two weeks, they breakfasted in the hotel gardens under the shade of the cool, sweeping palms. The breeze was a reminder of their isolation, smelling of the ocean and nothing else. Lunchtime, they would dine either at the hotel, which provided a vast selection of eateries, each of discriminating and individual refinement, or they would venture out about the island and eat at one of the small, indigenous bistros or cafés tucked along the brilliant stretch of white beach at the salted foot of the sea. They drank cold, tropical drinks beaded with sweat and, when in the proper mood, the man would order a plate of flat fillets of anchovies, heavily salted, and eat them without crackers and just a small cocktail fork. The girl would smile and read her poetry books and watch the man as he ate and drank. If they were seated at a table on the beach, she would dig her toes into the sand while she read.
At the pools, she would swim laps while he watched and worked over his sketches, and she would sometimes pause and prop herself up on the paved concrete ledge of the pool and smile at him. Looking at her, flexing and popping the tendons in his sketching hand, he would smile back. It was one of those rare and perfect moments when you are so incredibly content that you are too afraid to move or breathe and risk ruining any of it.
“You look tired and hot,” she would say. “You should come in the water.”
“I’m fine here.”
“You should come in.”
“I like watching you swim. You’re beautiful,” he told her, “and it’s better for me to look up and watch you swim, sweet.”
“The water is like magic here,” she said. “I feel I could swim all day until it’s dark and I would never get tired. It’s like magic that way.”
“Don’t get too tired.”
“No,” she said, smiling beautifully at him, “there’s no getting tired.” She told him, “It’s like magic.” She said, “We’re in a dream.”
“Yes,” he said back. “Oh, yes.”
“I think I’d like to go lay out all sexy on the beach,” she told him.
“You should put on some sunblock so you don’t burn.”
“I want to tan. I want to look pretty for you, and tan.”
“You don’t tan,” he said. “You get pink. Like shrimp.”
And she laughed. “Like shrimp,” she repeated, still laughing. She had the perfect mouth for laughing—a small, discrete mouth, where the outskirts of her lips hardly exceeded beyond the boundaries of her small, narrow nose. “Like peeled and pink shrimp.”
They swam together in the cool sea during the day. The girl swam out far, but the man stayed in close to the shore. The water was not clear enough for one to see his feet on the bottom the deeper he waded out. Cold patches were in abundance, and it was very easy to be comfortable one moment and to have your muscles freeze in the sudden chill the next. At night, the tide came in close to shore and pulled at the sand, making it smooth and dark and fine. Their footprints from the daytime were washed clean away. (It was good, they discovered, to hike the dunes surrounding the hotel, and to recreate, on a constant basis, their footprints. It was their stake on the land.) One afternoon, some of the brown-faced Moroccan staff deposited several planks of whitewashed boards out behind the hotel. During a walk, searching with casual interest through the sea-grass, the couple uncovered the planks. The man retrieved his paints and made faces on them while the young woman laughed. They were faces, caricatures, of people they knew from back home. They were good faces.
There was a triad of marble fountains on the east side of the hotel and in the dip of a valley courtyard, large and wholly clean. When the weather was nice, great white swans could be seen drifting across the surface of the water, and on the clearest days, the sky and the great sweeping clouds were reflected. And for quite some time, the weather was nice.
But when the rains came, the winds tore at the great palms and stripped the magnolia trees bare. The storm shook the hotel and rattled the windows. It was a strong, dedicated rain, and it came to the island as if by custom, pounding the sand and roiling the sea and beating hard and strong against the framework of the quaint but magnificent hotel. The rain came only once and lasted a full two days, and the skies never cleared on those days, and everything remained dark and wet and muddy and as if caught in a dream.
The shrimp boats scaling the coastline were ambushed by the torrential rains on the first day of the storm, and there proved some difficulty in turning them around and steering them back toward port. The man, Nick D’Nofrio, could see the vessels through the large, glass patio doors of the hotel room. He could see the great shrimp nets, pulled back and fastened against the bodies of the boats, coming undone and whipping loosely in the strong wind. He could see the braided, sea-slick lines, and he could hear, even from where he stood behind the glass and so far away, their rough engines breaking through the current over the rush of the storm. There were three boats, and they were having a difficult time maneuvering back up the coast in the storm. The tide was creeping up the beach and the waves were enormous and foamy and white, and the boats, in turning around, would burst through the foam and leap into the air and crash back down into the ocean. Nick could see all this through the glass patio doors. Outside, the rain accosted the doors and the wall of windows, shades drawn, and the harsh wind stripped the headstock of the great palms in the courtyard. The pools had been closed down, and they were empty and lonely in the courtyard. What patio chairs that had not been collected lay strewn and forgotten about the pool area, many on their sides like fallen soldiers. From the windows, Nick could see the beach, too, out beyond the courtyard, and it did not look like the beach either he or the girl had become familiar with. It looked cold, dark, and foreboding, the sand packed hard and solid from the rain, its color dark and bone-like. It looked smooth, too, and like glass.
There was a large brass clasp bolting shut the patio doors. Now, Nick undid the latch and pushed the doors open. He cracked them only two inches, but the wind was strong and he could feel its strength against the doors, could feel it trying to take them from him. The wind was cold, too, and it rushed into the room through the opening. The sheer white curtains billowed out and a few leaves of hotel stationary, each page emblazoned at its bottom with the hotel’s crest, rustled on the desk across the room. Shivering, he looked out at the rain and saw it coming down, punctuating the surfaces of the three fountains in the courtyard below, as well as the surfaces of the swimming pools, hard and unforgiving and like something nearly alive.
Holding onto the door handle with one hand, he managed to produce a lighter and a half-empty pack of generic cigarettes from his breast pocket. He pushed the cigarette between his lips and, with his right hand, fumbled with the lighter. The flint kicked up only blue sparks. He couldn’t light it and, after a few moments, grew agitated and stuffed the lighter back into the breast pocket of his shirt. The cold made his hand hurt, rendering it temporarily useless.
They ate dinner in the small hotel restaurant that first night of the storm. Neither of them had an appetite. The girl drank plenty of wine and looked forlornly at her salad throughout the meal. She was dressed plainly in a printed dress with thin shoulder straps, which exposed her small, round shoulders, the freckled skin a faint pinkish color from the summer sun. Her dark hair was cropped short and leveled just to the line of her jaw, pulled back behind her ears at either side of her round, smooth, white face. The waiter, who was a young boy with dark skin and a black, neatly kept ponytail tucked discreetly into the collar of his starched and pressed uniform, undoubtedly sensed the couple’s unease. The young waiter had been very friendly to them the first few days of their stay, but he did not say much this first night of the storm.
He could sense the change, Nick knew.
The waiter took their orders and brought their drinks with an air of anxious discomfort. Nick watched him closely, watched him to see if he kept quiet because of the unease. Or perhaps, Nick thought, the young waiter was like an old farm dog whose demeanor was influenced by something in the storm. Yet Nick didn’t think it had anything to do with the storm.
“I don’t like being quiet with you,” Emma said at one point during dinner.
“Sometimes it’s necessary,” Nick told her.
“Is it necessary now?”
“I think that maybe it is.”
“I want to say something to you,” she said. “I feel like there is so much to say and that I should say it to you, Nicky, but I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“Nick…”
“Just eat.”
“But I need to talk to you. We need to talk.”
“Don’t.”
“I just feel—”
“Don’t,” he said again. “Not now.”
“Can we please talk?”
“I think it’s necessary to be quiet now,” Nick said.
She left before the check came on that first night of the storm. Nick paid the bill with a credit card after ordering a final cup of hot coffee from the dark-skinned young waiter. He sat, sipping the coffee, which he took black without cream or sugar, and remained seated at the small, circular table against the bar, looking out past the sheet of windows along the wall and at the darkness of the night and the intensity of the rain. He thought, This rain should be just as strong by the end of summer. I feel that by the end of summer, this place will need much rain to wash everything away. He thought about this and did not know what it meant…yet he was familiar with truth, and knew he could not lie to himself, and knew that when he understood most things, he usually understood the truth in them first before he understood anything else about them. And he did not know if such a talent was a good talent.
The young waiter, who had been friendly the first few days of their stay, did not approach the table to refill Nick’s coffee; he hovered nearby, instead, like a lone hyena waiting for a pride of lions to depart a heap of fresh kill, his black eyes roving over Nick and over the now half-empty table, apparently lost in some sort of personal deliberation. It was obvious he wanted to clear the table and be done with it. Nick finished his coffee and set the cup on the edge of the table, baiting the young waiter. Finally, the beckoning cup became too tempting and obvious to ignore and, sporting some reluctance, the young waiter eventually made his way back to the table.
“You want a refill, Lieutenant D’Nofrio?”
“Please. Black.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. I remember how you like it.”
“I hope it’s not too late. Are you getting ready to close down?”
“It isn’t very late. The kitchen is closed,” said the young waiter, “but the bar will stay open for a few more hours. Were you still hungry? I think there’s some soup still on the stove, if you want it.”
“No. I just didn’t want to be a nuisance.”
“Of course not, Lieutenant.”
“What’s your name?” Nick asked the waiter.
“James Sanders.”
“How did you know I was a lieutenant, James?”
The young waiter suddenly looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. The bell captain told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you were in Iraq with his son, and that you tried to save his son’s life.”
“Is that all he said?”
“Yes. I didn’t ask anything more about it.”
“How old are you, James?”
“Nineteen, Lieutenant.” The kid treated him with respect.
“Your father was in the military?”
“My father was in the Navy, sir. We lived in Annapolis when I was younger.”
“Your father’s retired now?”
“He’s dead now, Lieutenant.”
“Hell,” Nick said. “I’ll just have that coffee, then, James.”
“Yes.”
The second cup of coffee came and Nick sipped at it, watching the rain sluice down hard against the wall of windows. It was an old and beautiful hotel, fitting for the island. He remembered the drive in and remembered how it was difficult to tell when you were leaving the coast and arriving on the island. The causeway that communicated with the mainland was wide and expansive, and there were always trees and small, shanty-like houses balanced precipitously at the edge of the island. Emma had been reading passages to him from one of her poetry books—Byron, if he was remembering correctly—and when they had hit the causeway, she had looked up, anxious to see the glistening span of water and the approaching island ahead. But it had been difficult to make out the island, as it all looked like flat, connected land, and there was really no long stretch of water separating the island from the mainland. Still, she had stopped reading, having tucked Byron (or whomever it had been) neatly in the rift between her seat and the Impala’s passenger door, and, with adolescent alacrity, had looked on through the windshield without speaking.
That was like a thousand years ago, he thought now, sipping the coffee and watching the rain. Two weeks or a thousand years ago. It’s all just about the same when you get right down to it.
Emma could not sleep that first night of the storm. She remained on her back beside him, warm, in the bed and in the dark, and he could see her from the corner of his eye as he remained on his own back until he finally turned over and away from her. Sleep would not find him, either, and he listened long and hard to the rain coming down against the patio doors. He said nothing while he listened to her breathing, very close beside him in the bed, once familiar but so suddenly alien and frighteningly removed to him, as if he did not know her—as if he had never known her. They had not talked since dinner and, even at dinner, they had not talked.
Put yourself back on the beach, he told himself. Rewind everything just one day and put yourself back on the beach, and in the daylight, and without the storm and the wind and the creaking of the hotel in the throes of the wind. Put yourself back on the beach, he thought.
“I don’t like it,” Emma whispered just as he was about to fall asleep. She caught him in that state of half-consciousness where he found it temporarily difficult to differentiate between dreams and reality.
“It’s just a storm,” he said after realizing he was awake and everything around him was real.
“Can you move closer to me?” she said.
“I’m right here,” he said.
“I don’t like it. It’s loud and so much, and it bothers me.”
“It’ll be fine,” he assured her.
“I can’t find sleep. The rain is too much and I can’t find sleep.”
She was silent for a while. Then, at one point, he heard the bed creak. In turning slightly and looking over at her from the corner of one eye, he could make out her slender, pale form slipping off the side of the bed and moving through the darkness of the bedroom toward the patio doors. She did not say a word. He watched her linger, unmoving, before the midnight glow of the storm, her figure silhouetted against the moonlight and framed in that rectangle of double-doors, and did not say anything. To him, her form was familiar, unlike her breathing had been only moments ago, and he found a confusing mix of emotions in such a familiarity. The urge to go to her was suddenly overpowering. Yet he did not move from his place in the large bed except to pull the sheets up tight around the base of his neck and against his collarbone. The girl hadn’t closed the drapes, and he watched the rain slam against the patio doors and watched her slight frame stand before the doors, her thin and pale arms hugging her body. It was a hard rain. He could smell the girl, could still smell her in the pillow and in the sheets, and the smell was warm, clean, domestic. It was a smell only the slightest bit salty from the sea.
“It’s like a completely different place,” the girl said, facing the storm. “It’s as if we’ve been uprooted and dislocated and we’re trapped here, now and forever. It’s like a dream, a bad dream, but I know I’m not asleep and I’m not dreaming. It’s hard to find sleep thinking of it in that way, and thinking of us uprooted and dislocated that way. It’s so sad, to think how wonderful and bright and sunny yesterday was, and all the other days, and then how dreary and sad it all was today.”
“It’s only rain,” he told her. He tried to recall the sensation of her warm legs and cold feet against him beneath the sheets as he had experienced it as recently as the night before. But it seemed a distant memory, and it was as though something deep within him refused him access to it. He remained on his back, unmoving, his eyes locked on the patio doors across the room, and on the shape of the girl standing before them. “Everything,” he said, “will be better and back to normal once it passes.”
“Do you promise?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think it’s possible for the whole island to drown?” the girl asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure? It seems like something I might have heard once, or maybe read in the papers.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a tremendous amount of rain.”
“It’s a very large island. Anyway,” he said, “they’re prepared for storms like this.”
“I saw that,” said the girl.
“Saw what?”
“The blue signs posted along the highway on the drive in. Didn’t you see them? They were big blue signs with a picture of a hurricane on it. We drove in along the evacuation route.”
“This is just a storm,” he said, “not a hurricane.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Hurricanes are different. They’re stronger and there’s more wind and they come much more suddenly than a regular storm.”
“Have you ever been in a hurricane?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
He shifted his eyes away from the patio doors and stared up at the ceiling. The room was suddenly very dark. He watched for quite a while the blinking red eye of the smoke alarm above him.
“How do you know?” she said again.
“Excuse me,” he said, peeling the sheet off and standing and moving across the small room to the bathroom. He turned the light on and washed his face in the sink. There were seashells placed randomly around the sink basin; she had spent yesterday afternoon collecting them at the edge of the water. He continued to wash his face and to examine it in the long mirror above the sink. What a long, sad, old-looking face you are, he thought. You’ve only been on this earth twenty-seven years, and what an old-looking face you are.
The water felt good. Until now, he hadn’t realized he’d been perspiring. It was a small, deeply enclosed bathroom, claustrophobic and damp. The moisture from their morning shower still hung in the air. They’d gotten their clothes sandy and wet yesterday down by the water, and she had hung them across the retractable clothes line over the tub to dry them out. He went to them and felt them now. The clothes were still damp and stiff with sand.
Back in the room, he was somewhat relieved to find the girl asleep in the big bed. He stood for some time, listening to the unlabored ease of her breathing over the strong rush of the storm, and did not move.
―Chapter II―
He dressed quietly in the dark, not wanting to wake the girl, and slipped out of the room into the narrow, peach-colored hallway of the hotel. Here, the lighting was poor and there were no windows along the hallway. The wallpaper was undeniably floral in pattern, though faded with age and vaguely nondescript, the way shapes on the horizon may sometimes look to someone suffering from nearsightedness; sections peeled at the corners and rolled up in brittle, curled, cigarette shapes. They were on the sixth floor, six doors down from the stand of elevators, and as he walked to the elevators he counted down the numbers on all the doors silently in his head as they gradually descended.
Downstairs, the lobby was quiet. Nick walked its length, conscious of the urgent rush of rain against the lobby skylights, and of his footfalls desperate and lonely on the linoleum. It was an old hotel, and the ground-level corridors were not open and spacious and brightly lit but, rather, small and serpentine and hard to find. At times, it was like wandering lost through the subconscious mind of a senile old man. Before a blank wall toward the rear of the lobby, Nick paused and, hands wedged in his pockets, looked up at the rough sketching there done with a series of graphite pencils, completed over the past two weeks. Completed? he thought. Is it really? Colorless, unfulfilled, the sketch was like the ghost of some long-dead reality. It was rough, raw. He stepped back to take it all in. He did not like it, he realized. He’d given it two days to sit, had thought he would like it, or at least would be contentedly pleased with it, but standing here now, he found he did not like it and was not pleased with it at all.
The sketch was of a quaint summer courtyard, not dissimilar to the hotel’s own courtyard, dense with magnolia blossoms and tropical fronds, abutted by a great sprawling sea and bisected by a winding stone path. There were people, various people, populating the landscape, but their evolution had been temporarily stunted at rough caricatures, their sexes indeterminable, their emotions nonexistent. He had sketched them then discarded them then sketched them again. He had sketched until his sketching hand ached and pained him and became so insubordinate that he could no longer work. Looking at the drawing now, he felt it was too naked to move forward, and he silently wondered when he would feel right—or if he would ever feel right—about moving ahead with the process.
Process, he thought. See that? It has become a process, some process. There is no art left here. It is mechanical; it is processed.
He stepped back around to the front of the lobby, suddenly wanting to smoke but knowing for certain it would be unwise to risk stepping outside to do so. Even the sprawling arcade that covered the gravel driveway would afford no protection against the biting wind and strong, driving rain. Still, he wanted a smoke. He’d seen people smoking in the bar, hadn’t he? Yet he couldn’t recall. For a brief moment, he entertained the notion of disabling one of the smoke alarms in the ground-floor bathroom off the lobby, but just the thought of it—and the sense of deviousness and, moreover, self-pity associated with the act—caused him to quickly brush the idea aside. Was he really going to become some lunatic disabling smoke alarms in hotel bathrooms just for a few quick drags?
He saw that the bell captain’s podium was left unattended. There was no clerk behind the front desk, either. The lobby was a mausoleum.
The hotel bar, on the other hand, was still somewhat awake, its limited patrons like defeated athletes who, following the onset of age and unavoidable physical deterioration, had grown bitter and nostalgic in their despondency. Nick straddled the stool nearest the wall of windows so he could listen to the rain at his back. Glancing around, he saw an elderly man with a rough-looking face and a comically bulbous nose seated at the opposite end of the bar, absently peeling the label from a bottle of domestic beer. Across the room at one of the tables sat another man, heavyset, intense and deeply Hispanic-looking, alone except for half a bottle of Chianti served traditionally in its woven basket. It was a good hotel that respected tradition and still served their Chiantis in woven baskets, Nick thought. Then, on the heels of that: Listen to me, sitting here and thinking to myself like some goddamn old man, or like some bitter old war veteran. It must be my old face making me think like this. What a lousy old bastard of a face. Looking up, he saw only the conga-line of bottles above the counter. There was no wall-length mirror behind the bar, and for that he was grateful.
Even at this hour, he could not stop his mind from thinking. It was difficult, he found, to summon the memory of the people they both had been—both together and individually—just a single day ago. Difficult…but not impossible: a few glittering shards managed to survive deep within him, valued and sparkling like treasure at a moment when it seemed everything else had been demolished by the holocaust…but in uncovering these truths he felt himself torn between the reality of the world he now lived and the utter fakeness of all he wished the world could be. It was a child’s foolish daydream, and he was suddenly very much that child. Yet knowing this did not help anything. There was no getting beyond it. God, he wished he could get beyond it.
Don’t think, he told himself. Stop thinking. It was good advice.
He couldn’t stop.
The bartender eventually made his way down to the end of the bar and Nick ordered a Dewar’s and water.
“I can smoke in here, can’t I?”
“All you want,” the bartender said. “I’ll even get you an ashtray.”
Nick crooked around on his stool and watched the rain pelt the wall of windows. The trees in the courtyard, black and panicked, shook in the tempest: sinners at the foot of an angry god.
“I know how you feel. I’ve been here two years now,” the bartender said, “and I still can’t sleep when it pours like this. They say it takes some time getting used to. I wonder if I have that kind of time.”
“So this is normal?”
“Last summer, we had such a storm blow in that the winds uprooted some of the trees from the front quad and pushed one through those big plate-glass windows in the lobby. The original windows were stained glass and there were jagged little bits of colored glass all over the place. We were finding pieces of colored glass for the next few months. Not to mention all the stuff from outside the wind brought in. You’d be surprised how well bits of glass can hide.”
“I can believe it.”
“Well, at least you had a few good days before the storm came,” the bartender said, setting the drink on the bar. “At least you had a chance to enjoy the beach some, too.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nick said. “The beach.” He sipped his drink then took a deep, healthy swallow. The scotch tasted calm and smoky and the alcohol was quite liberally distributed. “I’d forgotten what it felt like to be out on the water. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen the ocean.”
“You can’t beat the ocean, man,” the bartender said. “I take my boat out on the water every single night. It’s especially impressive at night. Really puts into perspective how small we all are.”
“Yeah, we’re specks.”
“Lost little specks. Like broken bits of glass.”
“I just got real tired of sand without water,” Nick said. “I’m tired of hot and I’m tired of yellow and I’m tired of dry.”
“That’s why the ocean’s good. You’ll see it again. The storm will pass,” the bartender said. “Beginning of summer, it’s always like this. Sometimes it’s worse, too, like I said, when the tree was thrown through the windows. But it’s normal. It’s like some introduction. Wouldn’t be summer without the first big summer storm to set things in motion.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Wonder if it’ll affect the cicadas.”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“Ever seen them? I never have. Sort of curious.”
“Never seen them,” Nick said.
“They’re supposed to be enormous. That they come out and swarm all over everything. Kill the trees, lay eggs in the bark…”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“So how much longer will you be here, Lieutenant?”
“Until I’m finished,” Nick told him.
“Will it take you long to finish now?”
“I don’t know. I can never really tell until it’s nearly done.”
“Every morning I look at it, and then I look again every night when I close this place down to see what you’ve added to it throughout each day. Past few days it hasn’t changed much. I just figured you might be done. Are you finished with the sketching part?”
“With the sketching part,” Nick said. “Yeah, I think so.”
“It’s really damn impressive. I mean, I’m no artist, you know, but it’s certainly something to see. You have a talent.”
“Thank you.”
“So will you start painting it soon, do you think?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Unless my lousy goddamn hand refuses to cooperate.”
“Is it giving you trouble?” the bartender said, but would not look at the hand.
“It’s all right for now. Sometimes it aches and goes stupid and useless on me, but right now, sitting here, the damn thing is fine. It’s working with it that’s the tough part. And, really, the sketching is the hardest part. It’s the fine details that make the hand weak.” It certainly was the fine details, Nick understood, although he was new in understanding all of it. The mural was the first thing he’d attempted to paint since coming back from Iraq.
“Well, the sketch looks really damn good, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not so happy with it.”
“Seriously?”
“It lacks nuance.”
“Oh,” said the bartender.
“You know anything about nuance?”
“Not in paintings,” the bartender admitted. “No.”
“Nuance,” Nick explained, “is what makes it all real and worthwhile. It’s the details. It’s the things we incorporate that you need to see and experience firsthand to even know they exist in order to recreate them and give them a sense of honesty.”
“Hell, I’m sure there’s nuance, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not so sure,” Nick said. “And can we quash the lieutenant business?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. D’Nofrio.”
“My name is Nick. You’re just about the same age as me, Roger, for Christ’s sake.”
“All right,” the bartender said, then added, “Nick.”
“Forget it. I didn’t mean to jump on your back. Call me whatever you want.”
“It’s fine.”
He drank some more scotch and could tell the bartender was thinking something but he could not tell what it was. “Come on, Roger. I’m just sulking here.” He tried hard to sound pleasant. “Don’t they sulk much back where you’re from?”
“Milwaukee,” Roger said. “And yes, they sulk. But it’s Wisconsin. They have a hell of a lot more to sulk about.”
“All right, all right,” Nick said, bested. “I’m just giving you a hard time because I’m tired and dissatisfied with the sketch and, anyway, my hand’s been hurting like a bastard lately. Come on—no more back jumping.”
“You didn’t jump on my back,” Roger said. He was tall, very tall, with close-cropped, sand-colored hair and severe blue eyes—eyes that were much steadier than Nick’s own. “I didn’t feel any jump, sir.”
“Good for you, then.”
Roger, the bartender, chuckled good-naturedly.
“Tell me why I feel like I’m fifty years old, Roger.”
“I think sometimes you look twice that.”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you’re just tired.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, nodding. “Tired. Good. Always tired. What a son of a bitch, right?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a little cold in here.”
“Is it?”
“Do you feel it?”
“I think it’s warm, actually.”
“Oh.” He felt a skip in the groove of his own warped consciousness. “Are you married, Roger?”
“Sir?”
“Are you married?” he said again.
“I was at one time,” said Roger.
“How long?”
“Seven years.”
“Wow. That’s some time. You’re young, I mean.”
“We married very young.”
“On purpose?”
“I’m sorry—?”
“What I meant was, there weren’t any, ah, extenuating circumstances, if you…well, you know…”
“Oh, no. No.” Roger said, “She wasn’t pregnant.”
“Did you love her?”
“Of course.”
“Was she pretty?”
“She looked just like you would want a wife to look.”
“Did you have any kids together?”
“One.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
“This is like extracting teeth, Roger. What’s her name, this girl of yours?”
“Faye,” said Roger, suddenly digging around in his rear pocket. “She’s the reason I moved to the Carolinas.” He produced a worn leather wallet, flipped it open, and slid out a creased, dog-eared photograph of a beautiful, dark-haired, smiling girl.
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Roger said, looking at the picture as if to commit it to memory. He then slid it back into his wallet and tucked the wallet away in his pocket.
“Children need a good, healthy place to grow up, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” Roger agreed.
“And you’re no longer married?”
“No, sir,” the bartender said.
“Why?”
“It didn’t take.”
“It didn’t take?”
“No, sir,” Roger said. “The marriage, it didn’t take.”
“You talk of it as though it were a goddamn organ transplant.”
“I’m sorry.” Something potent and previously available had suddenly dried up inside Roger, Nick could tell.
“Crap.” Nick paused, thinking, and looked at his drink. When he finally looked back up at the bartender, he said, “Forget it, man—Roger. It’s none of my goddamn business. None of it is any of my business. Don’t listen to anything I say tonight. I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing wrong with some conversation.”
“Oh, sure,” Nick said. “Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that at all.” And he rolled his shoulders—forcefully casual. “It’s just easier to talk about the rain sometimes. Or the—the what?—those bugs.”
“Cicadas,” Roger said.
“Cicadas,” he repeated. “Right.”
“How about another Dewar’s?” Roger, too, sounded just as eager to change topics.
“That’s something good to talk about, too. Scotch is something good to talk about.”
“Then I’ll fix you another one.”
“Let me get it, Roger,” a man said, coming up behind Nick and placing a hand on Nick’s shoulder. It was the bell captain, looking tired and drained and with half-hearted, glassy eyes. He was still in his uniform, though the collar was now unbuttoned and a bloom of steel-colored hair puffed out from his reddened chest. His ample, squat body looked uncomfortable in the uniform—big-bellied, thickly forearmed, simian-knuckled.
“Nicholas,” said the bell captain.
“Hello, Mr. Granger,” Nick said, and squeezed the bell captain’s forearm with his left hand. “You don’t have to keep buying me drinks every time I see you.”
“You will never pay for an alcoholic beverage whenever I’m around, Nicholas,” Granger said. “What you do when you’re on your own, however,” the bell captain continued, “well, that’s another story…”
“I feel like a mooch.”
“Nonsense.”
“At least have a drink with me,” Nick said.
“It’s been a long day, Nicholas. I think I can manage to actually get some sleep tonight. I’m going to try, anyway. With this storm, we’ve had no one arriving for the past several hours. A lot of cancellations. The hotel is very quiet and I’m going to use it. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Emma and I ate dinner down here a few hours ago,” he told the bell captain. “I guess everyone’s staying in their rooms. We were the only couple in the place.”
“I’m glad for the two of you. It can be such a romantic place. The whole island can be romantic.”
Nick, who did not wish to talk about romance, said, “Just one drink. It isn’t very late.” And before the bell captain could protest further, Nick requested a second scotch from the bartender.
When the drinks came, the two men drank together and mostly in silence. It seemed the most appropriate way to drink scotch very late at night in a hotel during a thunderstorm. There you go again, he thought to himself. There you go, thinking like an old man. How old do you really think you are, you lousy son of a bitch? Just because you’ve seen some things and just because your good hand has become your bad hand, do you honestly think you’ve lived enough to act and think so old? He knew he was a fool, and knowing this brought a wet little smile to his face. It could have just been the scotch, though.
“Tell me about Emma, Nicholas,” Granger said. They were both nearing the end of their drinks and it was the first real thing the man had said since he’d sat down. “Tell me about the two of you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know what it would be like to be your father, Nicholas, and to sit here and hear about my son and his wife. I want to know what it would be like to be proud and happy for you. I truly am proud and happy for you, Nicholas, but just for one little moment in time I would like to know what it would be like to be proud and happy as your father.”
Nick did not know what to say and Roger, the bartender, was watching Mr. Granger skeptically.
“Oh, hell,” Granger said after a moment. Perhaps he, too, felt the awkwardness. It seemed the entire bar was filled with awkwardness tonight. “I’m sorry, Nicholas. That was a lousy thing to say. I’m sorry.”
“Everyone seems sorry for something tonight,” Nick said from the corner of his mouth.
“I am,” Granger said.
“Not a big deal, Mr. Granger,” Nick said.
Looking up at the bartender, Granger said, “You know the story, don’t you, Roger?”
“What story is that, sir?”
“The whole story. The story about Nicholas, here, and my boy. You know that story, don’t you, Roger?”
“No, sir.”
“You know about my boy Myles?”
“Yes, sir,” Roger said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Thank you. And I’m sorry for you, too, Roger,” Granger said. “We’re like brothers, you and me. And we need to remain like brothers.” He said, “We’re all sorry and we’re all like brothers.” And the bell captain thumped a small, plump, red fist to his chest. His voice had taken on a peculiar cadence; it sounded the smallest bit hopeful. “Like brothers,” he repeated.
“Oh yes, sir,” Roger said, nodding without expression.
“This boy,” Granger said, rising from his stool and referring again to Nick. That hand was back on Nick’s shoulder again, too. Nick could feel the bell captain’s weight against him, righting himself as he stood. Granger said, “This boy.” He said, “Some boy.”
“It’s nothing,” Nick said, not looking directly at the bell captain.
“He saved my son’s life,” Granger said to the bartender.
“Is that true?” Roger said.
“I didn’t,” Nick interrupted. “Honestly.”
“He did,” Granger went on. “In Iraq, he did. He’s modest so he won’t tell it like it is, but I know the truth of it and I know what happened. I know because I have it in writing, in handwriting. A medic that worked on my son, he wrote it in a letter just before Myles died. I know that Nicholas tried to save my boy’s life.” Turning back to Nick, and lost in his own approbation, Granger said, “Some boy.”
“It’s late,” Nick said. “You look tired, Mr. Granger. It’s been a long day, too.”
“I apologize, Nicholas. I shouldn’t have made you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t make me uncomfortable, sir.”
“You’re a good boy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
To the bartender, Granger said, “He’s a good boy.”
“So then the next drink will be on the house,” Roger said with very little enthusiasm.
“Yes! Because,” Granger went on, “he does not pay for a drink in my company. Ever. For as long as I live.”
“All right,” Roger said.
“For as long as we both live,” Granger clarified.
“All right,” Roger said again.
“For as long as Nick and I both live, I mean,” Granger further clarified. “Not you and I, Roger.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“Though we are still brothers. Yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
Granger nodded, pleased. “Goodnight, then, Roger.” And in slow motion he turned. “Goodnight, Nicholas. And I’m sorry for spouting all that father stuff. It was uncalled for.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Granger,” Nick said. Once the hand was off his shoulder, Nick turned to watch the bell captain leave the bar and disappear down the corridor that communicated with the hotel lobby. Granger walked like someone with a doomed destiny—heavy, dejected, resigned. Nick could see the old man’s shadow stretched long and out-of-shape along the gray-green linoleum floor tiles and move ghostlike along the wall.
“They call him the poor son of a bitch,” Roger said, emptying the remainder of the bell captain’s drink into the sink pit beneath the bar. “Behind his back they call him that. There he goes, the poor son of a bitch. Off to drink again, the poor son of a bitch. Lost in himself, the poor son of a bitch.” Roger was watching his own hands manipulate and twist a greasy dishrag into some sort of cudgel. “And,” Roger continued, “it’s one thing to be a poor son of a bitch out in the open and when you know you’re one, Lieutenant, but it’s quite another to be one behind your own back.”
“It’s late, man. He’ll be all right.”
“He was in here an hour ago when he got off duty.” And then, as testimony, he added, “The poor son of a bitch.”
“I could tell he was a little drunk. But that’s okay. He’s entitled.”
“Hell,” Roger said. “We’re all entitled.”
―Chapter III―
Nick woke early, but Emma was already up and gone. He touched her side of the bed and it was not warm. He wondered how early she had gotten up.
The sheer curtains had been pulled halfway across the glass patio doors, and the shades over the windows were still drawn. From where he lay, he could see only a cursory account of the outside world. There was scarce daylight; the rain was still coming hard, that second day of the storm, and the sky looked tired, yellow-gray, and worn out. The whole room looked exhausted and smelled strongly of sleep. The sun, shielded, burned silver the thin cirrus threads on the horizon. The coastline was a brute coastline, obstinate and heady, heavily foamed, bleached, alkaline. And despite the full onrush of the storm, the island sat eerily swaddled in quiet, like a great, beating throng suddenly paused, or like the cumulative pendulums of a massive network of clocks, all simultaneously frozen (and against all semblance of rationale) at forty-five degrees to the right, directing time to a standstill.
Nick pulled himself from the bed and crept over to the patio doors. Peeling back the sheer curtain, he could see the world outside still dark and gray and monochromatic. The tallest of the courtyard palms were bowed over in the strong wind, their leaves whipping frantically, bullied, stripped and shiny and slick with rain. He managed to prop open the doors, just slightly, and finagled a cigarette and lighter from the pocket of his shirt, which was draped over the back of a desk chair. A flick of his lighter coaxed a blue flame. He smoked, shirtless, exhaling through the slight opening in the doors, and it felt good. The shock of the freezing cold air made his nostrils burn. His right hand shook when he held the cigarette, and it made him not want to look at it, not want to think about anything in particular, anything at all. He was glad, in some strange and melancholy way, that Emma had awakened early and was not in the room with him now. He could still smell her presence, though, like the cold tendrils of a passing ghost through his body, and he suddenly knew it did not matter if she were here or not because, on some level and in some way, she would always be here, and she would continue to pass through him like a ghost. There was no changing that, no escaping any of it.
Some goddamn world we live in, he thought, when even the saddest ghosts are spitefully relentless.
“You’re a dumb son of a bitch,” he told himself casually, tossed the cigarette out the crack in the door and into the storm, closed the patio doors, and made his way to the bathroom.
He showered for a long time, the water hot and pleasant on his tired skin. He dressed in black corduroys freckled with paint and a threadbare pullover. Then he went to a large clapboard trunk that was pressed up against one wall and opened it. Inside were crusted tubs of paint, gouaches, gums, brushes, an old Richeson wood palette, oil bars, painting knives, solvents, and hard, crusted rags. There were stacks of sketchpads, too, and he did not need to open them and flip through their pages to know what was inside them. Nor did he open them now but, rather, knelt before the clapboard trunk and ran his hands over their covers and examined them with only his eyes and his fingers, but tried hard to ignore them with his deeper senses. Their covers were worn, faded, pitted, gored by forgotten dirt pellets and scratched by ancient sand. He had filled the pages of those sketchpads back during a different time in his life. In a way, it had been both a more complex time and a simpler time, although he was not quite sure how that could be or even how he came to understand such a thing. He had sketched them wholly and freely and undaunted, unlike how he had sketched the hotel mural for the past two weeks. The mural was different, requiring intense concentration and much deliberation. He was a different person now, it seemed. And he could only work a few hours before the lousy Raynaud’s set in, and he’d have to stop and wait and think and do nothing else but wait and think. It had never been that way before. It was a new process to him. Process, he thought again, turning the damnable word over and over in his head but too ashamed to speak it aloud. There it is again, that lousy word. And he could not look at the sketchpads without thinking of how he used to be and, sadly, how he was now. He knew that if he bent down and smelled the sketchpads they would smell like the desert. They would smell like Iraq. And thinking this made him think of the bell captain from last night, half drunk and nostalgic and full of self pity.
Get off it, he thought. Everyone feels sorry for themselves. It’s the way of the world. Who would we be if we didn’t feel sorry for ourselves?
Still, he did not like to think of the bell captain.
Closing the trunk, he stood and stretched his back until it popped, and realized he was hungry.
Downstairs, he crossed the lobby. The Palauan conch peddler who, for the duration of the good weather, had manned a small wicker hut out on the beach and had contented himself with vending drift jewelry to small children with fistfuls of coin, had, on the persistence of the storm, moved his wares indoors; he stood now in the hallway, swaddled in the cool summer gray of a lightless morning, the shadows of the raindrops falling out beyond the foyer windows dimpling his dark skin, his face, the wide, tented expanse of his shoulders. He was a good-looking, tall, red-skinned man, vaguely European in some respects, whose hair was a black mat of tight curls cropped close to the scalp, but slightly longish at the back. He stood now behind his improvised dais, fronted with layered latticework and rosary ivy hung in looped smiles. A display of hemp-strung seashells and statuary conchs, each glossy and shellacked, was spread out like the honed tackle of a skilled surgeon on a felt coverlet atop the dais. There, too, were necklaces of sharks’ teeth and pale green twists of palm for sale; were the ruddy, barren shells of oysters adorned with faux jewels; were the fossilized indications of starfish and horseshoe crabs impressed upon the stone; were wreaths of magnolia blossoms strung together on lengths of wire.
“Sir,” the Palauan said.
“Good morning.”
“Where is the lovely young woman today, sir?”
“Still asleep,” Nick lied.
“Would she like another conch? I have new, beautiful conch shells. She would fall in love with these new ones.”
“I’ll let her know.”
“You should surprise her, sir,” the Palauan said. “For you, and because of her, I will make the special deal. Pick two that you most like.”
“Not right now,” Nick said.
“It will be the good, special deal.”
“I’m sure.”
“A woman, she likes to feel she is always in the mind.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Perhaps after you’ve eaten,” the Palauan said.
“Perhaps.”
Nick walked quickly by, powerless to keep his eyes from the handsome man’s, and their gaze seemed to lock and remain for an uncomfortable length of time. Turning away, Nick slipped down the narrow corridor and paused momentarily to glance at the sketched mural on the blank wall before going into the hotel restaurant. The past two weeks there had been a panel of sun from the lobby working its way down the narrow corridor, which would fall on his back, warming him as he stood in this very position, sketching. But there was no sun today; like everything else, it had been eradicated by the storm.
Nothing to see here, he thought, his eyes still stuck on the incomplete mural while he walked away. Move along, please. Move along.
The restaurant was very busy, as many of the hotel’s patrons did not feel safe leaving the hotel grounds in the middle of such a storm. Nick did not see an available table. The bar, too, was full, and he did not feel like standing around waiting for a seat to open up. Nearest him, seated at the bar, a middle-aged, dark-skinned, muscular man with tight, wiry-pressed hair and wearing a black satin patch over his left eye, sat sipping a dark liquor in a tall, narrow glass. The man turned his head just slightly, and Nick watched the deep, thick creases form in the back and side of the man’s neck. It was a thick, reddened neck, heavily-pored and sprouting sparse black hairs. Nick looked at the man’s single glittering eye. It was an eye, Nick saw, that had spent much of the early morning (and, doubtless, much of the night before) befriending various liquors. The sloppy, drunk eye lingered on him. Again, Nick could not look away.
“What do you know?” the man said. Sedated with alcohol and corrupt with some heavy South Pacific dialect, the man’s question was almost too difficult for Nick to comprehend; indeed, he thought he’d misheard the man.
“I’m sorry?”
“What do you know?” the man said again, his tone and tempo unchanged. But there was no mistaking him this time.
“Nothing,” Nick said. “I’m sorry. I know nothing.”
“There is something you have to say?”
“No,” Nick said.
The man’s single drunk eye refused to look away.
Nick knew there was a smaller bistro at the opposite end of the lobby, and a nice café that made exquisite pastries on the second floor, too, so he departed the restaurant and wandered back the way he had come.
The second-floor café was less crowded. Unlike the restaurant and bistro, which were prominently advertised on placards in the hotel’s lobby and in framed pamphlets housed in the walls of each of the hotel’s six elevators, the café remained a well-kept hotel secret, the number of patrons enlisted to know of its existence limited to personal acquaintances or family members of the hotel staff. It had been the bell captain who had told Nick and Emma about the place. They did a fine business, though, and they were always busy. This morning was no exception.
The café was situated in a well-lit parlor with skylights, black and pounded by rain at the moment, and had a counter against one wall and small, circular iron tables arranged functionally about the parlor floor. Typically speared through the center with parasols surrounded by chairs cushioned in intricate floral patterns, they were the type of tables one might find gathered around the patio of some midtown metropolitan bistro. Many of these tables were occupied this morning. Nick stood briefly, surveyed the room. Emma stood from one of the tables and waved at him. He raised a hand in return to acknowledge he saw her but did not go directly to the table. Instead, he went to the counter and ordered a Jamaican espresso. While waiting, he turned and could see Emma facing him as she sat at one of the iron tables. She was with another woman—young, bright, tannin-hued, brunette—and they seemed to be involved deeply in conversation. The espresso came and he paid for it then went to the table.
“Hello,” he said, standing.
“Sweetheart,” Emma said…and their eyes lingered on each other too long; there had been something cold and dry in her voice when she’d spoken. But it passed and neither of them decided to make an issue of it.
“Sit with us,” Emma said.
Nick pulled out a chair and sat.
“Please…before any introductions, I want to congratulate you on your recent marriage,” the brunette said, smiling. She was attractive in a smart, serious, severe way, and looked just slightly older than Emma. Handsome for a woman. Darkly Spanish. Her skin was molten like oil, her eyebrows two thin, raven-colored half-moons above deeply-set eyes. “We have been talking about you behind your back like rascals. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Like rascals,” said Emma.
“Not at all,” Nick said. “I just hope I’m not interrupting…”
“Of course not,” said the woman. She spoke, too, with an accent that made it sound as if she were concentrating very hard on her English. She was European, Nick could tell. He had never been to Europe, but he could tell.
“This is Isabella Rosales,” Emma said. “She’s a…a what? What did you call yourself, Isabella?”
“A diagnostician of the human condition.” She said the word slowly—diagnostician. The whole phrase rhymed like a lyric.
“Yes,” Emma said, “a diagnostician. Isn’t that smart?”
“Smart,” Nick said.
“I am a photographer,” Isabella clarified.
“She takes pictures,” said Emma. “She’s been taking pictures all over the world.”
“It’s good to meet you,” he said.