The Sea Grape Tree Page 6

  “It sound like you need somebody to show you around,” she replied, batting her eyelashes. Shad tried not to suck his teeth.

  “I do, yes,” Danny said. He kept rubbing the glass with his thumbs, sliding them up and down.

  Shad folded his arms. “I can show you around during my lunchtime,” he said, “from two o’clock to five.”

  “If you’re free tomorrow,” Danny said, looking at Shad but leaning toward Janet.

  “I can’t go tomorrow,” Shad said. “I have to go to the clinic with Beth and Ashanti. The nurse come on Friday.”

  “I can go,” Janet piped up.

  “You can?” Danny said, turning to grin at her. “That’s cool. Where should we go first?”

  “Blue Hole,” Shad said, trying to ignore Tri’s beckoning finger. “You should take a trip to Blue Hole in Port Antonio, man, beautiful lagoon with deep, deep water in the middle. We can go Monday. Is my day off.”

  “What about tomorrow?” Janet asked.

  “Tomorrow is good,” Danny said. “I have to take a taxi to Port Antonio to rent a car, but then I’m free.”

  “My cousin Marvin can take us to Port Antonio,” Janet said. “He always charge me half fare.”

  Shad strolled to the other end of the counter and refilled Tri’s glass. The aging fisherman slurped a bit off the top. “Look like Janet have the hotel man under heavy manners already,” he said.

  “If she get her claws into him is worse than a crab,” Eli whispered. “She never let him go.”

  “I just hope he don’t catch crabs.” Tri snickered, slapping Eli on the arm, and the two men doubled over.

  “Shush your mouth,” Shad muttered. “Next thing, the man hear you.”

  “Is not true?” Tri said, his thin frame still trembling. “You don’t see how she working it?”

  “She a seamstress, you don’t know?” Eli hissed. “She sewing up the business.”

  “You mean, she going to pump his treadle?” Tri laughed so hard he almost fell off his bar stool, and his friend had to steady him.

  Waving their foolishness away, Shad moved back to his stool in front of Danny. He might as well not have been there, the man was so engrossed in Janet’s description of the sights she was going to show him. She was waving her hands around, telling him which beach was best, and then talking about a night club in Ocho Rios she wanted to show him, and how she would teach him to dance the reggae like a real Jamaican. And Shad could see that there was no going back now, just by the way Danny was smiling, his fingers tapping the counter halfway between him and the woman, a few beads of sweat on his forehead above the delighted smile, the increased budget forgotten. When he laughed, he gave a throaty laugh, full of desire and of feeling desired, and if the two of them didn’t sleep together tonight, Shad knew, they would do it tomorrow night.

  After they’d left—Danny insisting that he had to walk Janet home—Shad washed up the dirty glasses at the bar sink, worrying, sometimes bringing God into it, that the dressmaker would mess up the hotel deal and his dream of a prosperous Largo. Maybe he should warn Danny that Janet was only looking for a husband to give her a green card. But if he warned him, Danny might think that Largo people just wanted to use him and his money, and he wouldn’t see that they were good people who talked the truth most of the time.

  He tried to see how it would end if Danny fell for the leggo gal, the hussy, and it made his stomach go from a churn to a knot. No scenario had a happy ending. He saw them lying side by side on a beach, drinking and dancing in a club, ripping off each other’s clothes, and tumbling into a bed. He visualized (too clearly, he chastised himself) Janet straddling Danny, her sumptuous breasts swinging as she worked him and worked him, felt the sweaty exhaustion as they lay together in a heap afterward.

  This was followed by the even more troublesome thought that, a few months down the road, Janet might dump Danny because his penis was too small or he was too cheap or he was already married, and Shad was sure that, having found fault with Danny, she’d put his business in the street the way she always did. Then (oh, God!) he envisioned the opposite: Danny dumping Janet and going back to America without her. She’d be enraged and tell everyone what a bumba claat no-good he was, because she was not an easy woman. And, either way, Danny wouldn’t come back to Largo. Every possibility Shad imagined concluded with the investor pulling out of the deal and the death of the new inn.

  The next morning over breakfast, Shad told Beth about Janet’s offer to be Danny’s tour guide.

  “I telling you,” he said, and slurped his ginger tea, “the woman just outsmart me. I was offering to take him around, but she just bounce me out of the picture.”

  “We know she only after one thing.”

  “And you know what I realize yesterday? Is not only a conniving woman that can mash up the hotel plan. An innocent woman can do it, too.” While Beth unbuttoned her blouse and settled Joshua at her breast to feed, Shad told her, scene by scene, the way he always did, something disturbing he’d seen the previous afternoon, a wake-up call about the future of tourism in Largo.

  It was close to five o’clock, and he’d been making his usual trek back to the bar for his evening shift when he’d glanced across the road. Between two houses, he’d had a straight view of the beach, where three people were in conversation under a coconut tree. He’d strained for a better view of the three, because one was a white woman he’d never seen before. She was so tall and lanky, her hair so red-red, that he would have remembered her if he had. And her legs and arms were so pale, pale as the sand she was standing on, that he knew she’d just arrived.

  Standing on either side of her had been two local layabouts, one thin and the other stocky, both a head shorter than her. The youths were doing all the talking, it looked like, and the woman was looking uncomfortable but smiling politely. The bartender had waited until a pickup passed, crossed the road, and walked between the cottages to the beach.

  “What up?” he’d called out as he approached the group. The boy who was talking had broken off and all three had turned around. The woman had started edging away.

  “You just come to Largo?” Shad had said to the redhead, speaking slowly so she’d understand. She nodded, and the flaming hair nodded with her. She’d been a nice-looking woman even if she was thin—mauger, Beth would call her—the kind of woman who was too well mannered to say no. Trouble waiting to happen.

  “Zebediah,” Shad had asked the skinny youth, “you not bothering the lady or anything, right?”

  “Why I want to do that?” the boy had said, and glanced at the other. “We making friends with her, seen, like how she just come to Largo.”

  “Well, I come to take her to the restaurant,” Shad said, waving the two away. “So both of you can go about your business now.”

  “We not doing nothing—”

  “Go on,” Shad insisted, and the two teenagers had sauntered away, sucking their teeth.

  “You mustn’t do any business with them, you hear, miss,” Shad had explained. “They want to take your money from you. Don’t have nothing to do with them.” The woman’s face had relaxed and she’d thanked him for helping her.

  “They wanted to sell me some marijuana, I think,” she’d said in a nice English accent. “I couldn’t understand them, but they said something about ganja and I know what that is.”

  “We don’t have a lot of visitors, you know, and they see a chance to make little money. The boy Zeb, his grandmother can’t handle him, you know. He sell weed now and again, and he getting his friend into it, too. Bedward was bright-bright in school, but he stop going to school and start making mischief with Zeb.”

  Guiding the woman back to the main road, Shad had told her he worked at the bar. “You want to come and have a nice drink, a coconut water or something?”

  “I better be getting back,” she said. “I was taking a walk o
n the beach—”

  “Better you walk with somebody else,” Shad had advised, smiling so she wouldn’t be too afraid, “or walk on the road. Not that anybody going to hurt you, but some people might see you as a stranger and want to take advantage of you. They think you have a lot of money.”

  The woman had thanked him again and they’d gone in opposite directions. Shad had walked back to the bar in a trance, realizing for the first time that Largo might not be ready for the inflow of tourists that would come with a hotel because, in the eight years since the boss’s hotel had closed, the young people had gotten more desperate, their options fewer by the year. A new hotel would attract every lazy, good-for-nothing youth for miles around, every one of them looking to make easy money off the guests. If they didn’t get work, they’d be all over the tourists with offers of weed and sex and hair-braiding.

  Shad looked at Beth, shaking his head. “Next thing, people in America hear that they going to be harassed in Largo—”

  “And the tourists stop coming.”

  “Innocent or guilty, a woman can mash up everything the same way, yes.” Shad stood up, stretching his arms overhead. “Nothing simple, eh?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  The wide silver bangle on Sonja’s wrist reflected the candlelight, making the flame appear fatter, brighter. Everything about the writer sparkled with her delight at Roper’s return, her full lips and cheeks glowing.

  “Where’ve you been playing lately, Ford?” she asked. All heads turned to the end of the dining table where the newest guest was sitting.

  “New York, right?” Roper said. He wore a scarlet mandarin shirt that matched the wine he was sipping.

  Fordham Monroe looked up from his roast beef. He was tall enough to have to bend over the dinner plate, his slim fingers extending almost the lengths of the knife and fork in his hands. The furrow between his eyes seemed to be debating his answer.

  “Didn’t you tell me on the phone you were taking a gig in the Village?” Roper prompted, stroking the deep grooves beside his mouth that brought carved furniture to mind.

  Ford dropped his hands to his lap. “I’ve been giving the trumpet a rest since London, man.”

  “A rest?” Roper asked. “What do you mean?” Probing ever deeper was always his pattern, it seemed, and Sarah winced inwardly in sympathy, remembering how it felt to be the subject of Roper’s scrutiny only two days before on his return to Largo. Strolling around the studio, he’d pointed out that the dimensions of his life-size canvases ­allowed the onlooker to connect with his subjects, and he’d lectured her about her own work as if she were a wayward student.

  “What I love about your work,” he’d said in an agonized voice, “is the perfection of it. Your symbolism is strong, your intricate composition is wonderful, your strokes clean and precise. But, why, in God’s name, do you have to contract life to a few inches? It’s as if you create these masterpieces and don’t want anyone to see them.”

  “I believe,” Sarah had said after only a second’s hesitation, “that my work is a microcosm of life. Whatever my subject matter is, I like to scale it down to force the viewers to look inside my frame in a totally focused way.”

  “You want to frustrate them, you mean.” Roper ran his hand through his wiry gray hair while he said it. She hadn’t made up her mind if she liked him or hated him. The experience of living in the home—a beautiful home, to boot—of an affluent black man was still sinking in with her. It was the first time she remembered being the only white person in a group, certainly in a home, and she still didn’t know how she felt about it. True, Sonja had been sweet and nonthreatening, Carthena had been civil, but Roper’s arrival had given her the clear understanding that she was the guest of a black man, eating his food, living under his roof, having to please him with her art. And Roper was no ordinary man. He was eloquent, arrogant, stylish to a fault, and fully confident of the rightness of his opinions.

  “Tell me the truth, how many do you sell a year?” Roper had raised one eyebrow like a mandarin in judgment. “Maybe you don’t have to live off your work like the rest of us, but the question is, do you paint for yourself or for others? It’s all well and good for people to appreciate your work, but you want them to take it home and put money in your bank account.”

  Her mother’s favorite expression had come back to her. Don’t make a fuss, dear, she’d say, always accompanied by a patting of Sarah’s hand.

  “The kind of buyer I’m looking for, Roper, is someone who sees the layers in my work, who understands the intimacy of my connection with them.” She didn’t mean to imply (even though she’d thought it) that a man in his midfifties who enjoyed being the center of attention, who painted large nudes of women because he knew they’d sell, wouldn’t understand true intimacy.

  Roper was not a man to be contradicted, however generous he was to his household guests, and few had the stomach to oppose him for long. Sarah had already concluded that her host relished the presence of his guests and whatever muse they brought to his home for one reason—he enjoyed controlling them. Confident and paternalistic, he’d throw out his opinions, emphasizing every word, sometimes spacing them so that each lingered in the air with authority.

  “It’s time to let your audience live the work, to put themselves in the scene,” he’d said, a smile playing around his large, square lips. “They can’t do that if they have to shrink like Alice to see them.”

  Halfway through the afternoon, Sarah realized she was no match for the man, especially since she was his guest, and she lied that she was already sketching larger works. “Do you have anything to show me yet?” he wanted to know.

  “I’ll tell you when I’m ready,” she’d answered, and made an excuse to go back to her room.

  Ford looked down at his roast beef and resumed cutting it. “It’s not just that Jewel couldn’t come, man. She had a miscarriage. It hit her hard, it hit us both hard.” He was talking so softly in his Southern accent that Sarah strained forward to catch his words. “We’ve had a rough time of it and she’s moved out. It’s over.”

  “Oh, God,” Sonja said, her carrot-laden fork in midair. “We had no idea, Ford. I’m so sorry.”

  “How awful,” Sarah mumbled. She liked Ford and his gentle, studied manner. He seemed like someone who would appreciate small paintings.

  “That’s life, right?” Ford’s voice got matter-of-fact as he refilled his glass with burgundy. “Thought it might be best if I got out of the city for a few weeks. There are worse places than Jamaica to chill out. Sorry I didn’t give you a heads-up before I came, but I—”

  “We’re glad you came,” Sonja said. “It’ll give you both some time to get over it. Maybe things will change by the time you get back.” Roper was looking at Sonja, allowing her to speak for him, but the writer had run out of words, and the sound of silverware chafing against plates took the place of conversation.

  The swing door to the kitchen opened. “Finished?” Carthena asked, her puff sleeves and aproned skirt reminding Sarah of a chocolate Swiss maid ready to burst into song.

  “I’m done,” Ford said. He laid his fork down and looked up at the young woman with a dutiful widening of lips.

  “But you haven’t finished,” the helper protested, shaking her beads.

  “I’ve had enough for tonight.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “It was delicious. I don’t have much of an appetite.”

  “I going to cook some nice food for you. We need to fatten you up.” Carthena’s smile remained fixed while she collected the dinner plates, and Sarah wondered if she’d heard some of their earlier talk.

  “Carthena cooks a mean escoveitch fish,” Roper said. “Can we have that for breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Nobody make it better than me,” the woman said, beaming. “I’ll buy some fresh snapper in the morning.”

/>   By the time they moved to the deck with a pot of coffee and a tray of cups and saucers, some sense of normalcy had returned, although the hostess made sure to serve Ford his coffee first. Around them, fireflies—peeny wallies, Roper called them—buzzed in and out of the darkened bushes.

  Settling back into a lounge chair with her coffee cup, Sarah pointed to the lights on the far end of the bay. “I went walking over there a couple days ago. There’s a bar there, right?”

  “A bar and a house on the hill—there on the left. It’s a beautiful house where a family called the Delgados live,” Sonja explained. “That other light—lower down, see—is the bar. It’s on a cliff overlooking the water.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Sarah said. “I met the bartender when I was taking a walk.” She decided to say nothing about the man’s warning, which, remembered on a soft tropical evening, now seemed like an overreaction.

  “We’ll take you there,” Sonja said. “It’s a cute bar, very—rustic.”

  “It’s right across from an island,” Roper added. “We’ll go before sunset so you can see it.”

  Ford leaned forward, showing some energy for the first time. “Do they have music in the bar?”

  “Not much live music,” Sonja answered, shrugging. “An American man owns it.”

  Roper entertained them with the bar owner’s saga, and they all tsk-tsked about the hurricane that had wiped the roofs off the villagers’ houses and resulted in the death of the hotel and the birth of an island.

  “You think your problems are bigger than everyone else’s,” Ford said, “but there’s always someone with a tougher story.”

  “I hear an investor’s come down to talk to Eric about building another hotel,” Roper interjected. “Maybe there’s hope for him after all.”

  After the hosts had excused themselves, Ford and Sarah continued sitting on the deck. They listened for a while to a CD that Roper had put on before he went to bed, and the trumpeter explained that he and his band had recorded it live last year at Ravinia, an open-air theater near Chicago. All around them, the squeaks and honks of crickets and frogs accompanied the music. Sipping a second cup of coffee, Ford commented on the many bright stars overhead, and they compared notes on the difficulty of stargazing in urban centers, a mutual pet peeve, it turned out.