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  Although she could give up wheat as instructed, and avoid the Internet café, she couldn’t stop following, obsessively in her mind, this thread that seemed to be leading her deeper into and not out of the labyrinth. It was only an enforced interruption that broke the spell, and that interruption was Phyllis.

  Jean’s mother had invited herself to stay—and Jean, generous at a distance of nine thousand miles, had encouraged her. Maybe it was her new loneliness, but she wanted to see Phyllis; surely she could refrain from childish flare-ups—generally provoked, after all, by Phyllis’s criticism of Mark.

  With Mark away she began to make plans for the visit. She imagined long walks on the beach. And then what? She’d take her mother to the old rum distillery that was now a museum. They’d go to the famous botanical garden, which Jean had yet to visit, and to the Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center, where there was that kestrel project she’d read about in Le Quotidien. A delegation of British and American bird lovers was attempting to boost a depleted population of kestrels—they were down to four pairs when the center opened. They finger-fed them prekilled mice; they incubated their eggs, and, in time, they would reintroduce them into their ancestral habitat in the St. Jacques jungle, itself shrinking and in urgent need of conservation.

  The Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center: like the Beausoleil Hotel, only more literal, Jean thought. (She’d been trying to shape a column about the well-known if hard-to-prove link between foreign holidays and fertility.) She drove around to see if she could get Phyllis day passes to the big hotels, where she would be pampered and entertained. She could see why tourists didn’t want to leave the expensively irrigated grounds, where they spent a week or two nearly naked, adding only a ribbon around the hips for meals, and where even the swimming pools were saronglike, wrapped around semisubmerged pool bars.

  Then there were all those coupons to get through: the step classes and the spinning sessions, the beach buffet and poolside cocktails, the moonlit ride on the banana boat and the dawn freestyle kite surf, the all-island steel-band competition and the Kiddy Klub Karaoke Kontest, the limbo, the bingo, the rumba, the rummy, and of course the room service—the in-house Cecils and Cedrics, the Rangoolams and Rishabs, the towel boys and waiters, the lifeguards and fitness coaches and, first among men, the deep-sea-diving instructors, including Aminata’s hunky son Amadou. This, anyway, was the picture Jean got from Aminata, with her many eyes and ears on the island, each with the perspective of a different uniform. And even if Jean sometimes bristled, it was a view that tallied with her emerging expectation of universal depravity. If Mark was in on it, why not everyone else?

  She had to ask Amadou if it was safe for older people to dive; Phyllis would love the carnival colors of the coral reef, the fetal weightlessness of the aquanaut, the reassuring presence of a broad-shouldered guide like Amadou, part-time Poseidon, blue-lit sea husband. She laughed to think of her mother in a tiny wetsuit and a cat’s-eyes mask, her flippers with kitten heels. When she finally tracked Amadou down between diving trips out to the reef, he reassured her that the only clients warned off were those who were pregnant or who suspected they might be. Women guests apparently came into the category of baggage everyone was always having to account for. And suddenly, Jean thought, the hitherto mind-numbing airport query “Did you pack this bag yourself?” gained fresh poetry and meaning. Abass, another of Aminata’s sons, worked at customs, and Jean had heard how the best-looking girls were whisked straight through immigration. Taxi drivers had two decisive advantages over rival predators: they were boys with cars and, like the crew on a cruise liner, they got first dibs. If Aminata’s family covered the full arc of experience on St. Jacques, her daughter Aissatou, a nurse at the hospital, stood at the dead end of the rainbow and witnessed the rising incidence of venereal disease: old-fashioned ailment, new kind of holiday souvenir.

  Driving back from Amadou’s hotel, Jean wondered if it was possible to write about the health hazards of sexual liberation without sounding 102. Wedding and honeymoon packages were standard offerings at all the big hotels, but some catered to singles—the young and not-so-young Western women on the party trail. Frantically carefree, they crammed it in before they got down to worrying about their own weddings. On the way home, she stopped in at the salon.

  Aminata—who trimmed Jean’s hair as her part of the Phyllis preparations—told her all about the wild Brits and mostly Australians. Salon gossip had always been a source of uncomplicated fascination for Jean, but now, with her head uncomfortably tilted back and worrying about damage to the nerve roots leading from the spinal cord (she’d once written a column about this, salon-sink radiculopathy), she found she no longer wanted to know about sexual misadventure. She certainly didn’t want to hear Aminata’s equally airy excuses for female genital cutting or polygamy; she’d grown intolerant of her relentless disdain for tourists, which, at times, was hard to distinguish from plain racism. She had to stop herself from telling Aminata to rein in her rampaging sons instead of slandering the girls they screwed—the same girls she overcharged, sometimes the same day.

  But she regretted this new rigidity in herself. She wanted to keep her lively friend and contact, and she wanted to be able to bring Phyllis to the salon; she’d be charmed by her. She’d remind her, as she had Jean, of their beloved housekeeper from the sixties and seventies, Gladys Williams from South Carolina, whose own hairstyle was a shiny black helmet of a wig. And Phyllis would love the little salon itself, with its flowerstenciled pink walls and matching rose sink sets.

  About the office-house Jean had no doubt: her mother would hate it. She’d look around and think they’d moved here to save money. In fact, Jean had been so enchanted by the former mining office, with the filigree portico of a Victorian railroad station and its rows of rattan benches, she’d immediately decided to buy it. But now she saw it with her mother’s eyes: potholes running the length of the drive; broken paving stones; cracked plaster walls green with mildew; a net of creepers engulfing most of the building; the tin roof giving a standing ovation whenever the rain rattled down.

  For Jean that sound—the amplified downpour—was forever charged with afternoon lovemaking, occasioned solely by the luck, their first day in the house, of being caught inside rather than out during a thunderstorm, knowing that no one would bother them for as long as it lasted. This uproarious greeting had cheered them just as they’d finished dragging in all the boxes and duffels—it made them feel both actively dry and safely home. In obeisance to these promising new household gods, they’d immediately sought the still-sheetless four-poster moored in an alcove deep in the Bureau du Directeur.

  Afterward, Mark had run out into the soft and steady rain to pick a mango they’d been amazed to spot through the window. They couldn’t find a knife and so had bitten into the extravagantly scented flesh, its “skin like a sunset,” as he put it. Then they held their faces out the window, straight into the rain, to wash away the juice. And they felt more than cleansed. It was just then, Jean thought heavily, that they’d first called the office, and by extension the entire island, the good place.

  But Phyllis would see at once that it wasn’t a house at all and wouldn’t be amused by the idea of not having to go to the office because you’d woken up there. She would think how, through the years, Mark and Jean had chosen to drag their little daughter all over the third world, boiling water as they went, luggage heavy with diarrhea blockers and fruit-flavored ion-packed powders, and then he’d voluntarily taken a pay cut in order to live here, in this office. What was the point of being in advertising if it wasn’t to make money?

  Her mother hadn’t told her why she was coming, and Jean, not wanting to admit she thought there might be a dreadful reason, didn’t ask. Instead, she cleaned. She knew Phyllis would find something to be disappointed about. Still, for three days she scrubbed—emptying the dead bugs from light fittings, sponging down the woodwork, beating the rag rugs, washing the pale blue slipcovers. She gave the guest bed t
he only unpatched mosquito net, wrenching her back with the hanging, and wondered if Phyllis would be seduced by the fairy cloud of white gauze or worried by what the net foretold. She must make Mark promise not to mention the scorpions.

  And then, in the last hour of her manic making ready, she gave herself some fine stigmata: standing on a wobbly stool, attempting to rehang a cupboard door that had come unhinged, she knocked herself in the eye and it immediately pooled with blood. She made things much worse by daubing it with that “magic” seaweed that Aminata had pressed on her, filmy green strips used on the island for everything from wound cleaner to omelette filler (thank goodness her readers couldn’t get hold of any). The eye became so goopy and inflamed that she had to wear a makeshift patch—a cosmetic pad under a rakishly angled bandanna that kept slipping like a badly tied blindfold.

  Yet with all her cleaning, she couldn’t scrape away the bad feeling that she carried inside her and that became more acutely disagreeable as Phyllis’s visit approached. She got up early and immediately sought the shower, soaping and scrubbing herself in the hottest water she could stand. In the past, morning had been the Hubbards’ time for sex. The ingrained impulse alone accounted for her unease as she woke, even when Mark wasn’t there, and for her unclean feeling, if only because it led her each day, before she’d even washed her face, to thoughts of Giovana. And the day after he returned, only four before Phyllis was due, the same difficulty followed her to the next trial—of breakfast.

  Regarding Mark across the table, all she could see was his decline, and travel fatigue didn’t account for it. He looked gray, pouchy along the jawline. His jokes were reflexive, also old. As he fiddled with the tea strainer, his bottom lip slid out a fraction—once sexy, suddenly irritating, elderly. His habit of constantly fingercombing his hair seemed vain and faggy, and of course the egg and jam at the corner of his mouth were positively enraging. (She felt sure they wouldn’t be there with Giovana across the table.) She could manage this surfeit of hostility only by avoiding him, walking outside when he came in, pretending to be asleep when he ambled into the bedroom, drunk, more often than not. But it wasn’t just Mark. Even the birds—perhaps the thing she loved most on St. Jacques—looked tainted.

  Gangs of parrots ruled the tall eucalyptus trees behind the house, their piercing screech echoing through the valley. At first she’d been thrilled to see them, with their paint-box colors. Now she felt there was something delinquent about them, like workers on a building site, with their steady stream of indecent whistles. On that last day of her preparations, Jean with her sweaty eye patch was convinced she could feel their ridicule sweeping down at her on that mentholated breeze, heckling her efforts. Head bowed, she just kept on sweeping, like a crazy pirate trying to find buried treasure with a broom.

  When Mark passed by in his blue robe, he looked friendly enough, but she saw he was keeping his distance. Didn’t he know that she knew—wasn’t her sweeping expressive enough of her outrage, her desire to be rid of the filth in their life? Perhaps he was praying for a silent deal: he’d give up Giovana and Jean would never mention it. She guessed he did want it to stop (where could this kind of thing go?) and that every time he actually saw Giovana he resolved—immediately after he fucked her—to end it.

  While Jean swept, Mark went down to latch the open gate—as if that, any more than her e-mailing, could keep out a determined intruder. When he was done he reached stiffly down—his tall person’s knees and back—and recovered his beer from where he’d placed it on the ground. She could see the relief spread through him as he drank, and pushed away an image of Mark with his lover in postcoital repose. Did Giovana love the way his feet hung over the end of the bed? Jean had always found this, especially the toes-down position, totally moving: Mark’s not quite fitting anywhere; and the homeless toes in particular, so literally downcast. Did he even think about Jean in that kind of detail anymore—her feet, her breasts, or the points of her collarbone, as hard and smooth under the skin as pearls wrapped in silk, as he used to say when he fingered the delicate nodules? Or had Giovana’s big costume jewelry crowded her out completely?

  She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. He saw her as more and more agitated, busy but producing nothing, a bird trapped in a house. Would he say that to Phyllis, “like a bird trapped in a house,” when Jean was making dinner and not there to protest, while her mother tittered, more flattered by the confidence than worried by the image? Not talking about Giovana was an agony for Jean. But nothing could induce her to open her mouth.

  He turned his back to the view. Feeling his eyes fix on her, she sensed, just possibly, his wish to convey that, despite everything, he did still love her. But Mark wouldn’t go to her, and risk the whole thing busting open with Phyllis about to descend. Still, he seemed to want to shoulder a little of the weight that pressed down on her so heavily and his contribution was to move the truck.

  The dented tricolor jalopy had been their first purchase on the island, a car that had the back scooped out of it to make a truck. It was only semireliable, but Mark adored its hybrid charm—long in the back, short in the front—a mullet hairstyle of a car, he said, complete with “pleather”-upholstered seats, and he insisted on calling it a carck. Jean tolerated the carck, approving its aura of the tacky bohemian, but for the duration of her mother’s visit, she’d drive a tidy rental.

  The interior road to the airport was shorter and therefore favored by Mark, but it was unpaved and deserted. Jean imagined herself tracked by vultures and dumbfounded goats, kneeling beside the new hatchback and wrestling with the rust-jammed jack, her airport skirt coated with red dirt. So instead she took the coast road, lined all along with reassuring life. Hands firm at ten and two, she was relieved to discover that the thought of Phyllis no longer irritated her. This was auspicious; surely most irritation started in the expectation of it, and the trick was to avoid the dread, not the encounter. Her mood was lightened by the breeze coming through the window, by the open road, and for the rest of the drive she sang.

  Phyllis was the last off the twelve-seater plane, picking her way down the aluminum steps with precision and delicacy, sidesaddle: the picture, to her health-expert daughter, of a woman intimate with her bone-density reading. Windswept on the tarmac, with a geometric scarf tied under her chin, enormous sunglasses, and fuchsia lipstick, she looked even smaller than Jean remembered. Or did her head seem disproportionately large, as if there was a hat under her scarf? This head, on this skinny body, gave Phyllis the appearance of an alien; and she hardly grew bigger as she got closer. But neither did she look as though she’d been on an airplane for two days—or rather three airplanes for two days, first toiling over to London before catching the eastbound jumbo, then the hop from Mauritius, the Big Island, as the locals called it. No, it was Jean who looked disheveled, with her wind-ruined hair and rumpled linen, then the bandage on her eye that seesawed her sunglasses.

  “This place is a riot. Fabulous,” Phyllis said, taking in at a glance the tiny airport, making Jean feel instantly defensive. “Your eye! Your skin! ” Phyllis was peering closely at Jean, still gripping her arms from their hug. “I’ll give you my hat when I leave,” she announced with resolute generosity, unwrapping herself to show she indeed had one under the scarf, a narrowrimmed raffia, part boater, part cloche, neatly placed on her immaculate chin-length hair, which was still tucked girlishly behind her ears.

  Well, that didn’t take long, Jean thought, wondering if Mark would call this headgear a bloche or a cloater, and deciding that she absolutely, categorically, hated the word “fabulous.” Jean was irrationally enraged by the large quantity of Phyllis’s luggage—and they were waiting for a third bag.

  “Darn,” said Phyllis. “It’s my shoe bag. I bet someone’s stolen it.” She squinted at the uniformed and armed security guard, then at the barefoot kids hanging around the entrance scanning the new arrivals, sizing up tips.

  “Mom, I really don’t think anybody’s stolen your sho
e bag,” Jean said. The relationship to shoes, as everyone knew, was a kind of litmus test for female equilibrium. Hadn’t Phyllis been a neat little packer in the old days, ever scornful of wheelies and garment bags, chic with just her carry-on? That was what Jean remembered from her mother’s visits to Oxford, watching through the rain-streaked window of the Randolph Hotel tearoom as Phyllis stepped out of a black London taxi, a complex fugue in brown, layers fashioned from the hides and hairs of at least four kinds of mountain dweller—alpaca, vicuña, llama, fox. No shoe bag in those days. “What happened to your packer’s principle, Mom: ‘Halve the clothes and double the money’?”

  “Well, how do you know I’ve abandoned it?” Phyllis replied, gamely enough. Jean, already worried about driving home in the dark, began casting about for someone to complain to. She had to wonder if more and bigger luggage signaled bloat elsewhere with her mother—amplified anxiety, panicky indecision, forgetfulness—and she felt a heavy presentiment of near and future trials. Never mind, she told herself. It was imperative that she manage the visit well: she was forty-five years old, nearly forty-six for Christ’s sake, even if for nearly half that time, for nearly half her life, she’d had Mark to share the load. In fact, she suddenly realized, over the years Phyllis had become his department.

  The shoe bag was finally found outside on the tarmac, where it had been off-loaded and forgotten; Jean added it to the already precarious cart and pushed it out to the parking lot and the lone car.