It was the 1970s and Melissa and I were in our mid-twenties when we lived in Mombasa, on the southern coast of Kenya. We were a few years married and had yet to have our kids. I was teaching Math at the college and Melissa was finding her way as a photographer, poking her lens into exotic corners, and her feminist mind wherever it wasn’t welcome. We lived in a sloppy little clapboard bungalow on the pleasantly overgrown and under-maintained campus where the work was low-key and the living was easy.
The city had been burned to the ground three times by the Portuguese over a couple of centuries as they fought over it with the Arabs, both finally losing out to the British who made it the capital of that part of their empire. Perhaps it was all the destruction and political uncertainty that gave the people their carefree, live-for-today natures, but I suspect it is generally how one develops in an equatorial, coastal town in a time of relative peace and plenty. Whatever its root, it was contagious.
It was always summertime there, and life was a beach. We learned how to scuba dive, bought a Hobie-16 sailboat (a catamaran: two hulls connected with a trampoline-like deck), and spent as much time as we could exploring the coast, the fishing villages, the Arab markets and game parks. The Kenyan politics was then, as now, overtly corrupt at every level, the culture was racist and sexist, the populace generally impoverished, and armed militias terrorized the countryside and slums, but we just sailed above it all. Armed with cameras, bottled water, sunglasses, and notepads, in every weekend we found new adventure.
We weren’t there six months when Melissa decided she was going to produce a coffee-table book, The Women of Mombasa, full of portraits, family stories, and social commentary. She spent her days in the streets and markets and her evenings at the typewriter. Her energy and commitment surprised but inspired me. For a few months I worked with her on some of her stories, mainly proofreading, and doing some research at the library. Gradually I realized what freedom I had, freedom to do anything I wanted, and I allowed myself to foster my own nascent literary project. I began working on my first of many unpublished novels.
Of course we weren’t the only expatriates living in Mombasa. Frank and Chris were our best friends and constant companions. Frank taught English at the college and Chris introduced herself as a writer, but she was working ferociously at the time as a journalist. They were both a few years older than Melissa and me, and had been around a bit more. Frank wrote poetry and articles for travel magazines, and he’d helped develop the English as a Second Language program for an oil consortium in Qatar before he’d taken this job in Kenya. He was tall and lean with flowing blonde hair and beard, and darkly tanned, spending hours of every day screaming across the water in his sailboat, a Hobie-16 like ours. He was a good sailor, having sailed all his life, and lived much of it on the Indian Ocean, in Goa as a teenager, and with a teaching stint in the Seychelles.
All four of us had ambitions, especially in those days, but it was Chris who was truly ambitious. She had been traveling and writing since she was a teenager, and at the age of thirty had a long list of publications. Her short stories had appeared in a number of anthologies, and she had travel, political, environmental, and feminist articles in everything from The Rolling Stone and The Nation to The New Yorker. She’d spent a year with Frank in Qatar and had been taken on as a stringer for the Washington Post and was now hot on exposing the many shortcomings of the powers in Kenya. Like us, Frank and Chris sailed above the poverty and corruption of the local scene. We didn’t live hand-to-mouth in the slums, and we were largely unaffected by the corruption. The stolen foreign aid wasn’t bound for us; the official racism was mostly directed not at the whites, but at the ethnicities that happened not to share power at the moment. Nevertheless, Chris, and to a lesser extent, Melissa, made all of the surface ills of Kenya their business.
We stayed there for four years. Most weekends we’d sail up and down the coast, or across to the reefs to anchor and scuba dive, or spend the days just racing, honing our skills and our eye for the weather. All four of us were competent sailors, and we’d sail the two boats in all combinations of crew. In high wind Frank and I would easily beat the women, but in light air it was Frank and Melissa that usually eked home in the lead.
Every few months we’d take a long weekend to drive up into the highlands to camp and to photograph the animals and talk to the game wardens and the occasional poacher. We learned the back roads and where to find the herds without the tourists. Chris made friends with the chiefs of a few villages and suddenly we had thatch huts to sleep in and meals of squash and plantain and wild boar that we shared with the men of the village. Frank was studying Swahili and he kept our hosts in fits of laughter with his butchery of their ancient and sacred language.
During the summer the school was closed and we traveled together, one summer to Turkey, another to India. Using local transportation and fleabag hotels and pensions we lived, ate, drank, wrote, read, explored, laughed and cried together. We talked endlessly about politics and religion and sailing and travel and feminism and literature and philosophy. We were not two couples, but a circle of friends. Best friends.
I remember one day during that second summer in southern India, someplace on the west coast, I’ve forgotten the name, wearing just our bathing suits, we’d walked out of town down the pristine and empty white beach. The coast there was quite arid and the vegetation was limited to a few succulents and grasses. Sandpipers scurried along the edge of the eerily still water. There was no wind and the ocean was flat and motionless. I suddenly had the sense that we weren’t in India anymore; that we could be anywhere, and we all laughed about it. Life is a beach and a beach is a beach. “Oh, give me a beach…”
Frank had brought the ubiquitous thermos of Margaritas and plastic glasses, and after a while we found ourselves in a little, deserted white cove that even on a windy day would have made a calm harbor. Frank poured us each a drink and we waded into the water then sank to our knees and lounged there, floating but not floating, sitting, kneeling, bobbing in the body-temperature, salty ocean. I let go of my glass and it floated there before me, the water was so still; then all four of the glasses were floating naturally, as if on the table between us. It was warm, maybe a hundred Fahrenheit, the sky that deep blue of the coastal tropics, and the silence booming. We were all tanned and lithe, with beauty and health shining from us like beacons. I can’t remember what we talked about, but it was something light. I remember raising my glass towards Frank and saying, “Here’s to Frank, master sailor, master friend.” “Hear, hear. Hear, hear.” There were many toasts, loving and playful. Melissa’s turquoise bikini shimmered beside Chris’ white, and long, tanned limbs, ending playfully in red nail polish, moved graciously against the spangled sand. We didn’t swim; we just lounged there, bobbing beside our bobbing Margaritas, a circle of friends, best friends, forever.
I know now that that beach was everywhere. We made it the marvel it was, and would have wherever we’d been. I’ve often wondered how different it would have been if I’d known at the time that that afternoon was to be the highlight of my life, and that I’d return to it again and again with the longing of a lover, sometimes in melancholy, sometimes in quiet happiness, sometimes in regret, often in tears. I can’t figure it out. At times I think I knew it then and just reveled in the joy of it, and at others that I just took it for granted, for what it was. In a way, I try to spoil it for myself by tingeing that afternoon with the sadness of knowing nothing would ever be as good again. But, thankfully, I’m never successful, because that sadness, whether through ignorance or wisdom, just wasn’t there.
To say that I loved Chris and Frank adds nothing to our relationship, or to your understanding of it. Of course I loved them. All four of us were in love. And, although we’d practically lived in each other’s arms those years, we’d never made love to each other’s spouse. It just didn’t happen. Somehow we were too in love with our own mates and too full of the wonderfully indulgent life we were leading to allow a shadow to fall across us, if a shadow it would have been. Or, maybe it was just that none of us knew how to broach the subject.
After four years the gig was up. Neither Frank nor I renewed our contracts. For some reason I guess we thought there were greener pastures we needed to find. I’d completed the manuscripts for three novels and wanted to try to get them published, and seemed unable to manage it from Kenya. Melissa’s The Women of Mombasa was long completed and had been published to good reviews by a house in London. Frank had a job lined up in Sri Lanka, and Chris was keen to seek out the leaders of the Tamil insurgents there who were just starting to make international headlines. I think that Melissa and I felt we’d had a pleasant hiatus, but it was time to get on with our real lives, to get our family started and to build a savings account.
Two months before the exodus I left work early, drove over to Frank and Chris’ house, where I knew I’d find her alone, and knocked on the screen door. She gave me a curious look, invited me in and walked into the kitchen to find us something to drink. I followed and caught her in my arms and pressed her to me. Her mouth sought mine, it was easy to find, and soon we were in bed. When we told Frank and Melissa that evening they didn’t seem to mind, but followed suit, and the next two months slid by in a rush of confusion and passion. The floodgates had opened, permission for the impermissible had been granted, and years of pent-up four-fold desire was unleashed with only two months to expend itself.
One day I was over at Chris’ for a rendezvous and found she wasn’t there. I let myself in and while I waited I idly opened a file folder on her desk. Some fifteen typewritten pages told the story of a woman called Seeker meeting up with two guys at Café Central in Tangiers. There was some heady conversation then she left with one of them. Really, it was more a fragment than a story. When she showed up, out of breath from running, I asked her about it.
“You read it?” She seemed alarmed, hurt at my invasion.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was just sitting there, so I leafed through it. It’s pretty good.”
“Oh,” she waved her hand dismissively, her irritation somehow dissolving, “it’s just a sketch.”
“Of what? What are you writing?”
“I think it’s a novel. The first chapter anyway.”
“That’s cool,” I told her. “It’s wonderful. Who’s Seeker?”
“It’s just a working name,” she said, shrugging; then she stepped out of her clothes and went to take a shower.
*
At the Mombasa airport there were hugs and kisses all round then Chris and Frank walked out onto the tarmac and flew off to Bombay where they were going to reconnoiter before their trip to Sri Lanka. The next day Melissa and I flew through London home to Vancouver where I expected to get employment at Capilano College. A few wistful letters were exchanged from both of them to both of us, and vice-versa; somehow our foursomeness survived the lust of the alternate twosomeness, and then the letters stopped. I think they stopped from our end, but I’m not sure. After our daughter Christina was born we got a Christmas card from Frank with a photo of the two of them on a garden swing in Colombo, but his note said that they had split up and Chris had gone back to the States.
I wrote several letters of urgent regret and begged him to tell me how such a perfect relationship could have ended, but he didn’t respond. It was two years before we heard from Chris that she was in some Caribbean paradise in the Lesser Antilles and was married again and happy. She told us that Frank had moved to Malaysia shortly after she’d left Sri Lanka, and so we were able to assume he’d not received my letters.
Melissa and I had three daughters before we called a halt to child production, and our lives seemed to be unfolding in the ordained manner. I continued to produce an unpublishable manuscript about every year until the count was nine, and Melissa took up drawing and painting in ink and gouache as a stay-at-home hobby, and after a few years was illustrating children’s books.
Over the years, off and on, we saw our friends. Frank twice made the effort to fly up from Los Angeles, once about twelve years ago, then eight years later. We spent wonderful weeks together slumming around Vancouver with weekends out to our favorite Gulf Island. He is the one who carried on the peripatetic lifestyle the longest and had good stories and a good tan. I was flying out to Boston one year and, leafing through the in-flight magazine, came across an article of his about the Maldives. He told us he’d quit writing poetry years ago, but kept meaning to pick it up again. He still exchanged letters with Chris, but hadn’t seen her for a few years. She had two children, one of each, and had moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
We knew this, as we still irregularly exchanged Christmas cards and I had several times managed to meet up with her when out paths had crossed. The first time was in New York when I was flying back from a conference in London and had five hours between planes. It was a rainy winter afternoon and we’d met at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. That was maybe 1990. She must have been forty-five then to my forty, and still a knockout. I effused, I bubbled, I cried, all to our mutual embarrassment. I have no idea what we talked about or how we left things. I just found myself back in the cab for the airport feeling both elated and lost. The last time we met was last year in Miami.
*
I’d called her the week before, telling her I’d be in Boca Raton on Thursday and Friday, and was not flying out until Sunday morning. Would she like to meet me for lunch on Saturday? She’d told me how to find the restaurant, another Italian, and said she’d be there at one. I arrived early, having nothing else to do all day, and sat at the bar for an hour reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The last chapter, Bernard’s monologue, is perhaps my favorite fifty pages in all of literature, and I often carry the book when I travel. With this reading I was not doing it justice, my mind being elsewhere. Several times I put the book down and walked out onto the sidewalk in the hopes of catching Chris’ arrival, but I was sitting, staring at the mirror behind the bar when she suddenly appeared in it. It was exactly one o’clock.
I’d followed her career in a haphazard way, subscribing to the rags and mags she tended to publish in. She wrote almost exclusively news stories, analyses, and documentaries about third world struggle, and usually with a female protagonist or a feminist slant. She’d developed a recognizable style, telling the guts of her stories always from the point of view of the heroine or victim, and usually in that person’s own voice. It was effective and personal, often gripping, sometimes harrowing. Her own story was always around the edges. She’d traveled by night to a particular village with the insurgents who’d told her this and that; she and her son had only escaped the gunfire by throwing themselves behind the burned-out vehicle; after three days of dysentery, doubtlessly caused by the fetid water of the only water supply in the village, she’d finally gotten to meet the jefe, only to find that her translator didn’t speak his dialect; etc. It was good stuff: informative, accurate, heartfelt, passionate, and politically correct. She was without doubt a hero to many thousands of people who had no voice but hers, and she must have acquired something of a following, and probably emulators, in the United States. She was making a difference, fighting oppression, and becoming more and more vocal in her condemnation of her own country as the root of that oppression.
We hugged and I kissed her ear. She laughed the laugh I knew. Still slim, dressed in a business suit, she was regal, and still a beauty, always a beauty. Lipstick, earrings, dyed fluffy hair: a different kind of beauty.
The restaurant was palatial with vaulted, sky-lit ceilings and potted palms and citrus trees creating intimate spaces for each table. We sat and looked at each other then quickly covered the mandatory issues: our children, Melissa, and Frank. She was reading the menu when I reached and took her hand, kissing it, first on the back and then the palm. She allowed it, but only just, and her smile departed when I released her. “Will you have a glass of wine?” I asked as we returned to the menus. She shook her head and told me she’d given up drinking a decade ago. I laughed and admitted that I had too, but I surveyed the wine list anyway, and when the waiter arrived I ordered a good Chardonnay.
The wine was delivered and our glasses filled. “To old friends,” I said, and she replied in kind. We clinked glasses and, holding each other’s eye, took a sip. “Hmm,” she said, “nice choice.”
And then we talked, a long rambling conversation that kept returning to writing and journalism and the trials of publication. She’d been back in the States for six years now, and had completed two books, one a collection of her newspaper and magazine pieces, and another of new work, essays on the struggle for democracy and equality and freedom from oppression in El Salvador (or maybe it is Honduras.) Neither had found a publisher. She’d had agents come and go, but none had had even a modicum of success. She’d spent months over those six years living in hotels in New York pounding the pavement and corporate doors, talking to publishers and agents and industry insiders and publicists, all to no avail. She continued to write for the newspapers and the occasional magazine, covering some international issues, but primarily Florida immigration and refugee debacles, and was occasionally called on by National Public Radio to comment on recent events in Central America, but it was getting old.
It was a disappointing story, but she told it without rancor. It was only a matter of time. In the meanwhile life in Florida was good. I reached again for her hand.
“And what’s the Seeker up to?” I asked.
Chris cocked her head in question then slowly a smile crept to her lips. “Ah,” she said, leaning back, extricating her hand, “my Seeker. I’d forgotten about her.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid she’s dead.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. No time. Not enough interest, I guess.”
“You’ve stopped writing fiction entirely?”
“I guess so,” she said. “Your options seem to narrow as you get older.”
She asked if I was still writing, and I affirmed that I was, although I’d been working for over ten years now on my tenth novel. “Why do you go on?” she wanted to know.
“Because it’s the most fun thing in the world,” I said.
“It’s amazing.”
“What?”
“That you even finished one!”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s so hard. Everyone has started writing a novel, but almost no one actually finishes one. And you’ve finished nine?” I shrugged. “Will you let me read one?” she asked.
“Sure, if you like. I could send you the current one. You’ve already read the first three.”
She looked at me quietly for a few seconds. “Oh,” she said. “I guess I’ve forgotten. Sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“So what’s holding you up on the tenth?” We talked about that for a while.
I suppose it sounds like a depressing conversation, but it wasn’t, at least, not for me. Just to be sitting there talking with her again was wonderful, and to realize that, through all the changes, we still had something in our current lives in common, somehow renewed our bond. Of course, a sexual current underlay every breath, and memories, vivid with intimacy, were palpable inside my skull, but none of it was mentioned. I have no idea what either of us ate, but I’m sure it was exquisite. When the plates were cleared and we declined desert the waiter looked disconcertedly at the bottle of wine. “You didn’t find the wine to your taste?” he asked.
“On the contrary,” I said, giving him a smile, “we were just saying how good it is.” He nodded mutely and as he turned away and I turned back to Chris I caught a sparkle in her eye that I hadn’t seen for twenty-odd years. She raised her glass, “To good wine,” she said, and again we clinked and sipped.
We reminisced for a few minutes, the suddenly she was looking at her watch and saying that she was late for her two-thirty. “What two-thirty?” I said, “It’s Saturday.”
“With the Miami Herald,” she said. “I’ve a story coming out in next weekend’s insert. You know, they do a glossy section in the Sunday edition. They all do it now. I’ve a story in it, but the editor has some problem. I’m already late.”
The waiter hadn’t delivered the bill yet, but somehow we were leaving. She handed me a fifty and said, “Be a doll and deal with the bill. I’m so sorry I have to run out on you like this.” I waved to the waiter that I’d be back, and leaving my jacket on the chair, I followed her out onto the sidewalk.
I handed her back the money, but she wouldn’t take it, so I grabbed her wrist and stuffed it into the only pocket I could see, the breast pocket on her blouse. “Which way?” I said, but she stepped into the street and waved down a cab. She gave me a brisk hug and a kiss on the cheek. “So nice to see you again. Just wonderful,” she said. “And, again, I’m sorry I made this damn appointment, but I can’t miss it. My love to Melissa.”
The cab had stopped and as she reached to open the door I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her around. She was tense, almost struggling for just an instant, then her shoulders relaxed and she smiled at me. “Bye Babe,” I said, and she submitted to a long kiss. I still held her, looking into her face trying to memorize her for another decade, but her eyes kept jumping towards the cab, so I let her go.
“Take care,” she said.
“I love you,” I replied, but if she heard, she gave no indication.
*
I handed the waiter my credit card and sank into my chair. I was rattled. What had happened? Nothing. Nothing had happened. She just had to run. She’d come all the way to Miami; she might just as well deal with her editor. Scheduling an hour and a half for lunch was reasonable. Still, I was disappointed.
I felt my jacket pocket for my book, but didn’t find it. I rose and went out to the bar and found The Waves waiting for me on the chair where I’d laid it. Part way back to my table I stopped and flipped through a few pages. It took just a few seconds to find what I was looking for: “A purple slide is slipped over the day. Look at a room before she comes and after. Look at the innocents outside pursuing their way.” How delicate is Woolf’s touch. Look at the room now that she is gone. Desolate. It can never be the same again.
My chair awaited me, the table my elbows. The glasses of wine, the smudge of her lipstick, the rumpled napkin. It was her toast, “Here’s to good wine,” that had twigged my memory, had got me sliding down the slippery slope to nostalgia.
“Do you remember,” I’d said, “when we toasted each other, sitting in the Indian Ocean in southern India. We had Margaritas and our glasses all floated in the water, and the warm water melted the ice, and we sat there all afternoon, the four of us, and each of us toasted the others, our best friends?”
“The glasses with Margaritas, full of Margaritas, floated in the water?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They weren’t quite full and it was dead calm, so they floated. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember we went to India,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
So I described the scene to her, the colors shimmering under the water, downy thighs and painted toes. “We were charged with love and expectation. We were perfect, the day was perfect, the world was perfect. We were the day; we were the world. Everything we wanted, would ever want, was right there within our grasp. And we grasped nothing. There was nothing more in the world we could want. The salt water warmly buoyed us, our green, melting, liquid pleasure floated magically before us. We were carefree and would always be.”
She smiled. “Yeah, we were pretty young and innocent back then.”
“I guess we were. Innocents in paradise; a paradise of our own creation.” She winced, but I blundered on. “But, don’t you miss it sometimes, the playfulness, the freedom?”
“Hey! We grew up. That’s all.”
“Did we? I think we just grew old. It was then that we were grown up, up on top of the world.”
“I hate maudlin,” she said. “Don’t get maudlin on me.”
I shook my head. “Not maudlin, not even sad. I love that we had that. I loved those times. I just wonder sometimes where it all went. Can’t we have a bit of it back? We all had such promise in those days, such potential.”
She was looking at her watch.
*
I signed the credit card slip and stood to don my jacket. It was a shame to waste all that wine, but I didn’t want it. Maybe the waiter would take it home.
She’d been right to leave, whatever the reason. I had been getting maudlin. I looked about the elegant restaurant, and felt the tailored silk jacket on my shoulders. The youth was gone, of course. There was no getting that back. As for the rest, we’d traded it for this.
Taos February 2000