Nine Island

  Nine Island

  Also by Jane Alison

  The Love-Artist

  The Marriage of the Sea

  Natives and Exotics

  The Sisters Antipodes

  As Translator

  Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid

  Nine Island

  Jane Alison

  Catapult

  New York

  Published by Catapult

  catapult.co

  Copyright © 2016 by Jane Alison

  All rights reserved

  eISBN: 978-1-936787-27-2

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West, a division of the Perseus Book Group

  Phone: 800-788-3123

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955988

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For ARK

  and in memory of G

  ONE

  SO I’VE SAILED the seas and come to—

  No. I’ve sailed no seas. I’ve driven south down I-95, driven south for days, until 95 stopped and I was back in Miami.

  No country for old women.

  I’m not old yet, but my heart is sick with old desire, and I’m back in this place of sensual music to see if it’s time to retire from love.

  What a delight to be free of that maddening monster, lust!

  So Plato claims Sophocles said.

  Could be.

  I’d just spent a month with you, Sir Gold, up where 95 starts. After thirty years since I’d seen you last, thirty years of disaster with men, one day you dropped from the sky to my in-box. Your name there I looked at a very long time.

  Ahoy! you finally said when I clicked.

  First we had a yearlong exchange of pictures and words. Then I flew up for a week of ceviche, strolls through hydrangeas, Greek pots. Then you asked me to come again and stay awhile in your stone house on a hill.

  These words I looked at a long time, too.

  Bring Ovid! you said. Bring the cat.

  Are you here yet? you said, when I’d just started driving.

  You smoked me a trout, yanked armfuls of greens out of your ground, made me a tarte tatin. You even filled your swimming pool just so I could swim!

  Gazing down at the naked older me, you murmured, Look at that.

  Later you said, Isn’t this funny, after so many years.

  Come closer, you murmured in the dark.

  And in the morning: happy whistling as you strode over wet grass with the dog, then bounded back to me still in bed.

  I thought, Could it be?

  Happy end?

  But when the month was done—well, who knows. Your hazel-green eyes went pained, and you decided it best to stay as you were, just the dog, the stone house, the hill.

  Thanks for coming up, though!

  I ramped onto 95 south thinking, Really ought to give up on all this.

  Sobs shook the Mini, rock songs blasting to heighten the pain, for seven high-speed hours.

  But give up on what, exactly, I have to ask myself.

  Has it not been decades of comical disaster?

  Should be good to give up on disaster.

  I stopped near Annapolis to see my mother. She is a lady who’s sailed the seas of love, all the way from Australia. She’s had a long career in men, trailing me along through husbands, then boyfriends, then the species of men who vanish by daybreak, until finally the seas dried up and she landed alone. She knows all about my wandering. Erring, as she calls it.

  You, too? she said to me once. Oh, my darling dear.

  When I parked outside her house in Woods Landing, she came to the door and wavered, silky as ash: she wobbles and lists even sitting. Loss of labyrinthine function, doctors say, a phrase that has bewitched us. She insists it isn’t dizziness; the horizon just started tilting one day, and she can’t get it to stop.

  I came in and watched her lurch and careen from wall to fridge, then tumble into a chair, surrounded by her carved and painted birds, clutching the table for safety.

  Look at you! I said to her. This has to end. You need a plan. Do you hear me? A plan for where to live next. It’s time.

  She tossed her head and glanced away. Let’s not talk about me, she said. Let’s talk about you, bossy girl. How’d it go?

  Meaning the month. She’d heard about Sir Gold three decades ago, when he first broke my heart. Then much, much more about him this year, when it all seemed so hopeful again.

  I shook my head.

  She pondered me. After a moment, sighed.

  Well, she said, placing her spotted hand on mine. Well, well. Maybe, darling, you should give up on all that. Maybe it’s just time.

  Got back in the car and drove blurrily south.

  Last chance lost! Odyssey done!

  From Annapolis down around D.C., through Virginia, North Carolina, South. Trees changed from oaks to loblollies to palmettos among pines as the sun freckled my hands, mottled my chest. Buster was with me, have I said that? Buster, my darling, the only real one. Skinny and black with a white spot on his nose, almost entirely blind and deaf, paws flailing for knowledge.

  Three decades of wandering among men. I have to ask myself, For what? Who made them the trees, the stars?

  Boys at seven running after you and knocking you down, sticky lips all over your face. Boys in alleys, on sand dunes, in cars; boys on tables, on stairs, in closets. Skinny blond painter with fish eyes I lived with awhile, tall architect with an eclipse in one eye and long hands that shook. The one I married and stayed with for years . . . Then the wretched end of that and it was back to the start: a heat-seeking tour of old boyfriends. Who knew? Might be something I’d missed. Wrote to old boyfriends from decades before—college, high school, one from fifth grade—the kind that really know you and send messages back that fill you with hope. Have thought about you often! Would love to see you. Come! The tour took me up and down I-95, involved lots of nervous drinking and ruinous sex, but one old boyfriend after another in flesh was not what he’d been in ether, and not at all what he’d been before. First was Lurch, then Mick, Sad Eyes, the Devil. But they turned out even more errant than me: girlfriends or wives kept secret in pockets, vessels broken on once noble noses, gazing into glasses of gin.

  And this was when Sir Gold appeared, drifting back into my life like a cloud.

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . .

  Just halfway along the footpath of life

  I looked up, alarmed—I was in a dark wood . . .

  Pine forests, pine barrens. Swamps.

  In Georgia I stopped at a hotel with walls made of oyster shells jammed in concrete, and in its saloon I ate shrimp and grits and drank too much wine for a woman alone, helplessly checking for messages. Someone—you—saying, Come back!

  Such a sickness, wanting. No end?

  After the hotel of shells came the zone of orange groves. I’m skipping the miles of spattered asphalt, turtles pondering on the side of the road, gas stations, Waffle Houses, outlets for cigarettes or perfume, trucks with no qualms about blasting my Mini to the shoulder. But we recover fast and mad, no trouble getting in their way again and making them lose time. Once we were in Florida, I gazed into the orange groves. Groves to the east, groves to the west, slanting corridors of citrus, the sun biblical as it set beyond them, an almighty crown of light.

  Then 95 ended and I was back in Miami. Where I’d moved two years ago, fresh from marriage and shaky, true, but full of hope and vim. Such vim! LIVE IN PARADISE, the ad had said. I’d looked up at all the glass shining high in the sky, enormous white clouds pulsing. Energy in that upper air: ions spun through deepening bl
ue, singing LIVE THE LIFE!

  But below that sky of dancing ions, up and down Route 1: billboards for breast augmentation.

  A clue.

  DROVE EAST OVER the Venetian Causeway toward my island, Belle Isle, with Buster, Ovid, Latin dictionaries, notes, an invisible trail of exhaust. Biscayne Bay glinted green all around.

  Haven’t really mentioned Ovid yet.

  He’s been my guide through the land o’ love from the start.

  Take my hand, he whispered when I was eighteen. I’ll walk you through the thickets of love and sing you strange stories to help you see.

  In fact I first met you, Sir Gold, the day I first read Ovid. A Tuesday: Latin in the morning, Painting at night.

  I was sitting cross-legged on the studio floor when a voice like a breeze in branches murmured, Got an extra pencil?

  I looked up: a golden boy’s face, hazel-green eyes as startled as mine, looking down at me.

  Pure light.

  It happens, you know. Shaft in the heart.

  It took us both a moment to stir, but he’s the one who moved first. He shook his head slightly and turned.

  Me: I was done. Soon I followed him helplessly from party to party, followed that torn suede jacket slung from his shoulders as he strode and laughed away. And when he happened to cross my path and those eyes caught mine—all words flew from my head.

  Late at night: I’d hover mute and drunk outside his door, too miserable to knock.

  Help me, help me, help me with this pain! I’d wail into the night, stumbling home on the flagstones.

  Ovid whispered, Echo and Narcissus.

  And turned the pain to art.

  Echo, who wanted a beautiful boy but had nothing to give, could not even speak for herself. Who’d want her? She pined and pined, wasted away, finally turned into rocks. Stones, bones. A voice hanging around in the air.

  Motored over the Venetian Causeway from the tollbooth to San Marino Island, past more glinting bay, and on to Di Lido Island and Rivo Alto, passing palazzi, modern white boxes, extravaganzas of blossoms and fronds.

  Orange sign on the shoulder:

  DRAWBRIDGE AHEAD.

  Which made me think:

  DRAW BRIDGE A HEAD.

  Which made me think:

  TWO MEN WALKING ABREAST.

  Which made me think:

  Of him. Again. A joke he once made when by magic I sat with him somewhere, trying not to melt in his eyes.

  TWO MEN WALKING A BREAST.

  He drew it and slid the picture my way. Two men and between them, a breast on a leash.

  See? he said, see? And laughed with himself, looked hurt that I didn’t, tucked the picture away.

  But the girl he finally married instead of me when I was too much trouble: that’s the kind of cancer that took her.

  The bell clanged cars to a stop at the drawbridge, so I got out to watch the bridge slowly split. Walked to the edge of the grassy verge and looked over the water to my island. Belle Isle, once called Bull Isle for the bulls that used to graze there, before a new, more belle clientele moved in. On it my building loomed huge and gray.

  The yacht nosed between the piers and glided near, long and sleek and shark-gilled. On its snout lay a black-haired girl in a moon-white bikini. As she drifted past, she tilted her head to the setting sun, and her eyes fell upon me. We gazed at each other through filmy air, her flesh emitting light.

  FOR INSTANCE (here comes one of those stories by Ovid):

  He sings of a girl on a beach who’s coaxed by a bull to climb onto his back. For “bull” be imaginative, please: let it be a metaphor. Understand these poems of Ovid’s as code. So. The bull’s lowered himself, bone-white elbows in the sand, making a place for her toes. As soon as she’s up, knobby knees digging into his flanks, he rises and plunges with her into the sea. Wild waves! What can she do? She holds on tight, fingers wrapped around his horns. Surely it’s more dangerous to let go and fall in than let herself be taken? Look how dark that water is!

  “Take” in Latin = rapere: rape.

  “Taken” in Australia = eaten by a shark.

  I might have the girl ride a shark instead, when I transmute Ovid’s stories.

  Just grab the fin, said a stepfather once as he lounged on the sand with The Washington Post and a beer. His long dark legs were crossed at the ankle, smoke rising from his hand.

  If you’re swimming way the hell out there, he said, and you see a big fin coming your way? Just grab it.

  Then what?

  Ride!

  But what if I let go?

  Well. He shrugged, laughed, flicked his cigarette away. I guess then he’ll get you.

  Sometimes you make a bad choice in these matters, of men and horns and fins.

  Sometimes it seems no choice is good.

  And really, I lie when I ask who made men the trees, the stars.

  Almighty fathers and stepfathers: that’s who.

  OUT ON MY balcony on the twenty-first floor, a wineglass sweats between my legs, my fingertips filming the keyboard. Miami Beach glitters and roars over the bay; beyond it, vast black sea.

  spectacular bay views!! pool gym marina tennis koi ponds so much more!!! live the life!!!!

  Well, the ad was true enough. There’s the bay, full of boats and lights and glossy black. Twenty stories down is the gym; around back, the pool, koi ponds, marina.

  Am sipping and pondering this life to be lived, while inside Buster navigates the floor. He’s grown more blind in the month we were gone. He leans a skinny black shoulder against a wall and creeps forward until a chair or table stops him, then wavers with opaque eyes until deciding to push onward. His little black body creeps over the cork floor, beneath maps of water cities and islands, beneath shelves of books about color and plants, beneath my desk stacked high with Ovid.

  Boats glint down in the bay, their lights and the lights’ liquid ghosts.

  Across the way, at Costa Brava, the next big condo on Island Avenue, a man has just stepped out to a balcony—and he appears to be naked.

  Can’t quite see—balcony rail is in the way. But I think I see the tender flesh channel at the hip.

  The one it can be so nice to run a tongue along, at times. On one’s way to delectable firmness.

  Swallow a mouthful of wine and ponder. Is it really time to retire from love?

  Ovid does not like women who drink too much.

  Trying not to do that.

  But tell me. Should I stay? Or should I go?

  My friend K from South Carolina, with fiery blond hair and furious thumbs and the fastest mouth I’ve ever heard, types me her opinion:

  You are NOT ready to retire, dammit. Put on that bikini, I don’t care how old you are, and go out and live that life.

  THE MORNING AIR of paradise rolls in molten waves over your skin when you slide open the balcony door and dip out a hand, glass and tiles so hot they hurt. Inside, Buster has puddled the floor—hard to see puddles on the swirling patterns of cork, and I skidded in two before coffee. Wiped them up with yellow gloves, wondering what to do next.

  Ignore problem and put on bikini, that’s what. Not a minute to spare to go out and start living the et cetera.

  Out my door I went in old polka-dot bikini, carrying towel and books.

  This building is old, not old old but Miami old, circa 1980. I knew it when I rented the place two years ago but see it harshly now. The building’s public areas, as they’re called, are full of heavy woodwork, mirrors, brass sconces fixed crooked to the walls, and along the curving hallways whose floors aren’t level—is that true? building sinking into sand, or what?—lies worn carpet with dull vegetal patterns that maybe once were green and orange but now are beige and dun. Door after door, brass sconce after crooked brass sconce, three of them flickering out. A smell. In the elevator are mirrors with cut-glass flamingos and, as the doors slid open today, a little pink man named Lino. In a white linen suit, s
trands of white hair beneath a white hat. He looked like a lascivious elderly elf.

  Hello! he said as I stepped in. Do you live here?

  I certainly do, I said, as I say each time he asks.

  He eyed me. You don’t look like you do.

  Yet I do. For now!

  Ha, he said. We’re all just here for now. But anyway. If you live here, you better make sure your husband’s a lawyer. Is your husband a lawyer?

  Said no. Asked why.

  Because the board’s a bunch of crooks, he said. All those guys, they’re going to ruin us. The pool, he said. They say it needs to be demolished. The whole thing replaced. The pool and koi ponds and garden and parking garage beneath it, the whole shebang. And you know why? Because they’re all in the concrete business. They’re crooks. Boy, do they stand to make out big—on us! Special assessments up the wazoo! So you better make sure your husband’s a lawyer.

  I’ll try, I said. Okay, this is me.

  The doors opened, he tipped his hat, I stepped out.

  Was this true? Good god. No way could I afford it—my landlord would for sure pass it straight on to me.

  On the mezzanine (a.k.a. second floor) is the restaurant offering early-bird specials; also the gym, where the bikes and running machines all rest; plus the card room, empty. No one up or down the long hall, just mirrors showing me, alarmed.

  Have been here two years and only now see: it’s a cruise ship. Empty old Love Boat. Once all the pairs have walked the plank and gone on.

  Wait, still here! Wait!

  But out back is the paradise jungle, ah, deep cool tropical shade. A pink concrete path winds past koi streams, through a jungle of fans and spines and huge shapely leaves, and at the end of the greenery: a blue pool like an hourglass. Still and clear, not a ripple, no stir, an hourglass full of sky.

  There was once a limpid pool, whispered Ovid—and I broke into a panicked run.

  Towel and books dumped on a lounge chair, dress shrugged off: crash in.

  Cool blue water pleats at your hands as you glide!