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  Enormous round leaves with raised edges like trays dotted the green surface. Mother and daughter watched bubbles rising to the surface, a frog or a fish, or, Jean liked to think, underwater waiters—and on their trays, proudly delivered up, the glory of the tropics, the great water lily of the Amazon. Jean bent and squinted, to read: VICTORIA AMAZONICA.

  “Hey!” they said in unison, exchanging a rare look of complicity, and headed for the exit.

  That evening, Mark took Phyllis and Jean out for dinner at the Royal Palm, the best hotel on the island, but not, therefore, one devoid of a steel band. Their table was near the moonlit dance floor, and so the three of them sat and watched, Phyllis air-tapping a tiny foot—no question of Mark dancing with either of them. But he’d danced with Giovana, Jean knew (recklessly, gaily), hence the “Ginger.” On many St. Jacques nights the betrayal of dancing burned most bitterly of all as she lay rigid with sleeplessness on the cliff edge of her side of the bed, listening to whole congregations of frogs in the puddles outside, chiming and pinging through the dark hours just like a steel band. Why was the dancing such an affront? Because he didn’t dance, and therefore, all these many years, neither had she. Ginger even boasted about sambas and tangos. Come on.

  Jean leapt up from the table—the ladies’ room, she pleaded. In the dim hotel garden she passed a kissing couple, one she’d seen earlier on the dance floor, a beautiful young woman in an asymmetrical blue dress and a much older man. Of course, the Royal Palm was a very expensive place, catering to old French couples who had to get through their money and to pairs like this one pressed up against a palm tree—hardly a consoling sight for Jean. She turned back to the dining terrace. Did Mark take Giovana to fancy hotels? Did he then pretend in the elevator that he didn’t know her? Did he buy her overpriced presents from the lobby shops and tell the salesgirls they were for his wife? Or didn’t people bother with that anymore? Nowadays it seemed more likely that, for a mere lunch break in the Presidential Suite, the salesgirls might themselves become recipients of these shiny trinkets. Anyone could, anyone but a wife.

  As a matter of survival, Jean started each day of Phyllis’s visit with a run along the road. She avoided the gym in Toussaint: too close to the Internet café. But one week into this routine, Jean found herself driving into town. Not trusting her daughter to have the basics, Phyllis had packed a nontravel hairdryer along with a five-pound transformer, but to no avail. She fretted for days under a halo of humidity-generated frizz before Jean took pity on her and brought her in to see Aminata. Later, Mark would pick Phyllis up and take her out on the boat belonging to the American who ran the Bamboo Bar. Jean, desperate for a day off, hadn’t wanted to point out that her hair would of course be reruined.

  She headed straight for the Internet café and settled in to look at her readers’ letters and to check the joint account. There was a business e-mail from France for Mark (À l’attention de M. Hubbard), a notice from Amazon and another from e-Bay, no word from Victoria. With nothing worth opening, she signed out.

  And then, absolutely determined not to open Naughtyboy1, Jean reached for the next best thing: real pornography—the world behind Thing 2. Research, Jean told herself, the most reassuring word in the dictionary. She logged on purposefully, beginning at the only site she could come up with, Playboy.com.

  Settling in for a good look, Jean was impressed, above all, by the hard work that went into being wanted. It reminded her of sixth-grade preening and posturing and parading in the cafeteria, often by girls who were pretty and already popular but still had this unaccountable drive, though she suspected it was the formerly not-so-popular girls who were putting in the real man-hours.

  She gravitated to the amateur sites where she supposed she had to place Giovana, among the other would-be actresses and models—along with housewives and students and travel agents and caterers, swimming instructors, accountants, product-safety inspectors, as well, she had no doubt, as lawyers, posing in bad lighting on half-made beds, squeezing breasts together as directed, peeking up from lowered heads or down through hooded eyes, generally looking evil or sedated. Occasionally there was a hairy arm at the edge of the picture, presumably the husband or boyfriend, positioning this woman, his prize pig at the county fair, her flesh oozing like melted cheese over too-tight mail-order bodices. Cheesy piglets. In fact, these images gave her just the uncomfortable feeling she had whenever she saw pictures of animals dressed in clothes or performing in a circus.

  None of us has any idea how we look, she thought, and particularly not, for obvious reasons, from behind. The one other thing you could safely say about the amateurs was that they were all optimists. Giovana’s pictures looked more professional than these, Jean noted, confirming her hunch that her correspondent was a working model, probably doing catalogs for “full-size” ladies—with the distant dream of Page Three. Mark met these girls all the time during auditions for new campaigns. She wasn’t even a runner-up, but he’d taken her number, “just in case.” He often worked closely on an ad, in quiet conference with a bevy of stylists and whichever ponytailed ego they were using as a photographer. Sitting here examining the images people put on the Internet all by themselves, for the first time she appreciated those stylists.

  Jean ordered a ham sandwich before the owner—he was also the cashier, cook, and cleaner—stepped out, leaving her alone in her corner. And she went on looking, either for the variety she herself now craved, or because she still hadn’t cracked why anyone—Mark, say—should really need a constant supply of fresh material. Hadn’t people done just fine with one battered magazine passed like the town slut from hand to hand? But now they had to contend with a gallery of new girls, a roster, a harem, a yearbook of new faces, every day. And with this relentless variety, why the samey feel? Real difference—along with noninadvertent humor—was elusive. While you can marvel at the supposedly endless range and specialization of human need and human want, Jean thought, in the end the physical possibilities are pretty limited.

  Maybe pornography was like the bullfight. The first stage might be mesmerizing, upsetting, with scattered moments of surprising grace, each in turn or all at once. Yet by stage three you’re looking at your watch and wondering if you should stay just because your seats are so good. Jean knew she didn’t have much to go on, but she thought that however predictable or disappointing the experience might be, no one in real life yawned like a hippo halfway through. Why was it so boring, and how in the world could it be boring and arousing at the same time? Perhaps because porno couldn’t be tender? Actually, she thought it could, if, like her, you constantly wondered how these girls got themselves into this mess in the first place—a generic sympathy she rarely extended to Giovana.

  Still, and these viewings confirmed it, Giovana remained for her a porn star apart. Jean was like a parent at a school play, exclusively interested in this one performer. And not because she had more to offer than a lot of other exhibitionists. No, she thought, only Giovana could shock because she wasn’t an actress. Her faking was for real—and it was all for Mark, a fact that not only continued to hurt Jean, but that also now confused her as she found, disagreeably, unmistakably, neglectedly, that she was jealous, and not of Giovana.

  Soon she would sign out; first, a last little tour, skipping the gruesome S-and-M stuff, which—and this was at least something—she felt sure wouldn’t have anything to tell her about Mark. So: there were specialist sites featuring women who’d retained their pubic hair. And there was a more wide-spread fetish, Jean was glad to see, for “mature” women. But she soon discovered that this didn’t mean older women or experienced women but, rather, desperate women. (She imagined the geriatric journal she subscribed to changing its name accordingly: Modern Desperation.) Then she found the MILFs, Moms-I’d-Like-to-Fuck, and though at least these weren’t the producers’ own moms, she was still disappointed that the moms in question were barely out of training bras.

  Jean was just thinking that they never accounted for
cold in pornography when, with delicious serendipity, she stumbled on a Norwegian product, set in a winter wonderland that hung suggestively with opalescent icicles. A giant blonde dressed only in fur boots was draped over the balcony of a snowcapped chalet, poised to lick an icicle, transported not by hypothermia but rapture, apparently unconcerned that her tongue might get stuck to it. In need of the lifeline of comedy, Jean wondered how she herself might feature. Working at her desk in her birthday suit? Or spinning lettuce at the kitchen sink wearing nothing except flip-flops—thongs for the feet. But she realized she’d merely look like an outtake from some documentary about a German nudist colony: a cure for sex.

  She found nothing here to help her with Mark; there was no fit. How could that be, since Giovana was so unmistakably rooted in all this? What did Giovana do that wasn’t done better at Superboobs.com, at Asstastic.com, Farmgirls.com, Golden shower.com, or by the indentured youth at www.lilteens? The answer, Jean realized, was this: Mark’s Giovana-featuring productions were, like all his other work, funny—childish, prankish, but somehow witty, and light. Whereas with this stuff, it seemed to Jean, the thread was hatred—always humorless—whatever else it pretended to be about: men determined to con and dupe, to corral and harness. Head’em up and move’em out. The format was as reliable as any Western—the cowboys using not only the good-hearted whores and sultry señoritas but also the Indians, the horses, the cattle, and sometimes even the faithful little dog.

  Jean signed out. She didn’t believe that turning away could restore her to a state of innocence or, for that matter, get rid of Giovana, with whom she had so incongruously and enthusiastically grappled. But at least she’d learned something—that she’d had enough.

  She was looking for her car keys and called out to check on how ready Phyllis was. Totally ready; it was Jean who was searching for her sunglasses now, and where was the good map? These two weeks felt like a month. Time to go to the airport.

  To her amazement, her mother seemed to count the visit a perfect success and in the car was brimming with praise for all things Jean—her house, her island, even her hair. As Phyllis herself might say, Who’d a thunk it? They tooled along the red road, ticking off the highlights: the botanical garden for sure, the Baie des Anges, but best of all, the Beausoleil Captive Breeding Center, where Jean had made a date to go back and interview the director, Bruce McGhee, about his plans to release all the kestrels into the wild. She’d never forget feeding that runty bird—what was his name, Bud?—and was determined to write about it, but not for Mackay. Mrs readers wouldn’t take an interest in extinction unless it was unfolding on Exmoor.

  She’d held out a dead white mouse on her flattened palm, like an apple offered to a horse. And as with her first up-close pony at age six, she’d been nervous, had wanted to toss or at least dangle the bait. A tail, a stem—who’s to say that’s not what they’re for? The horse with his smoker’s teeth had rewarded her stillness with a gummy tickle that had given her a first idea of what kissing a boy might be like. And here, forty years on, with the same palm outstretched as if for fortunetelling, she’d again stood still. The bird swooped: the brown wings, speckled white body and bright black eye, and a ripple of air no greater than from a baby yawning—then the almost imperceptible caress of talons on her hand as the kestrel took the mouse, bore it off, lifting up and out of sight.

  While Phyllis looked out the car window, committing the island to memory, Jean imagined how she’d soon hug her and then wave at her in the window of the small plane, how she’d stand on the runway still waving as the wind of the propeller flattened and then raised and then flattened her hair, giving the lie, and comically, to Phyllis’s praise. When the little plane was finally out of sight Jean would walk, no, she would stride over to the rental car, the late sun on her shoulders, and treat herself by not returning it today, or even tomorrow. On the way home her spirits instead of sinking would continue to rise.

  In the event, it wasn’t quite like this. Driving back, she saw the women’s clinic ahead and remembered that she’d never picked up her mammogram results. Surely they’d have called her if there was anything wrong, but it was too infantile not to go in and collect them. As she crossed the waiting room, jangling her keys to dispel the silence, the formerly cool nurse rose and came around from behind the reception desk to greet her. It seemed they’d been trying to contact her—hadn’t she gotten the letter? Jean registered a brief surge of nausea.

  Handing over the wobbly manila envelope containing her X-rays, the nurse explained that the mammogram was unsatisfactory—or did she mean inconclusive? They recommended une échographie. Jean had difficulty taking in this information and not only because of her French. I’m being handled, she thought. Smiling pastoral care. They know something they’re not telling me. Though she wasn’t quite clear what an échographie was, like a docile heifer to the slaughterhouse she booked an appointment, and left.

  Jean wasn’t entirely surprised—why else hadn’t she stopped in for her results? And she could now admit to herself the conviction she’d suppressed, that there was something there, on her right side. Not a lump, exactly, but a change in texture, as if deep therein lodged a scrap of…cheap mattress foam. Back on the ring road, she wondered if by her inaction she’d already decided this was a stray shred of foam, a lost bit of packing peanut that she could live with, or around. Maybe it would dissolve with exercise, or worry. Or grief.

  Jean’s hands ached from her grip on the steering wheel. Dread settled in her stomach like a brick that no army of enzymes could dent, going at it with their worst acids, every digestive pickax and drill. And it told her she was, apparently, being evicted. Not from the house, or even from her marriage, but from the island.

  The harsh light hurt her eyes, and sunglasses only seemed to introduce a burning contrast at the edges. Every bloom looked garish: the orange flamboya tree, the purple jacaranda, the fuchsia bougainvillea, red-orifice hibiscus, the gardenia stink bomb, the obscene anthurium. Even her favorite, the pale blue plumbago, seemed to overreach itself, crawling in everywhere it wasn’t wanted. She pined for a plain pot of hardy geraniums, suburban blue hydrangea, a tidy vase of odorless tulips. Instead, all around her, the full, indifferent jungle pressed in. Everything smelled either putrid or chokingly sweet.

  She may as well turn right around and motor straight back to the airport, she thought, because all of a sudden she couldn’t stop things from looking ugly—like the garbage all along the road. And as she knew from her walks with Phyllis, the more beautiful the place, the more trash people tossed there. The Black River Gorges had great heaps of it, specially carted in. She’d taken Phyllis down the trail, and soon she’d been pointing up at fictional birds, anything to distract her mother not only from the garbage, but from the carpet of used condoms covering the path like confetti on a church walk.

  Jean swerved to avoid hitting a dog. Death-wish dogs near death already, they littered the island. It was a common sight, the mutt hit and then left on the road to die, rolled out like cookie dough as drivers flattened it in two directions, until it wore away altogether. Nobody valued anything here. Families tramped out into the woods and chopped down a tree for firewood—so that the big rains that came every year brought floods and mud slides, every year. Images of whole settlements whisked off their toothpick moorings occasionally caught the attention of a foreign television crew or a foreign aid agency, but nobody planted more trees.

  She passed through a cluster of food stands and patchwork shacks. If St. Jacques was rejecting her, she thought—experimentally, defensively—she’d do the same. Look at these people, just sitting on the curb scratching their heads and pulling on their earlobes, dumbly turning to watch her drive past, people with luck so bad it must be deserved. But it didn’t work. Jean was miserable; she thought all she could ever want was to be allowed to stay on as before, unsingled-out.

  How could she forgive Mark this, the unfixable lost love affair with paradise itself, her island no longer
a haven and a home but a quarantine—hadn’t it actually been a leper colony at one time?—and so far from home home, far from Victoria, and her own doctor. Mark had so comprehensively uprooted their lives, with Jean idiotically following—never mind the broken connection she was experiencing now, loosened but not severed, no luxury of drama here, no mud slide, no television crew; just a regular, entirely foreseeable mistake. But going back and undoing the damage, this wasn’t going to be a simple detour with a clear price, like returning the rental car a week late.

  Forty minutes of fast driving and Jean came to the market spread across a large clearing by the road. On an impulse she pulled over, just for a moment. She stepped out of the car and breathed deeply, surveying the scene: swarms of shoppers and vendors, with their fortifications of rolled rugs and tilted coffers of ground spices, pulverized remedies for everything from echauffage, overheating, to “oppression.” Women steamed stuffed leaves, their gums bloodred from betel nut; boys pushed cartfuls of sliced jelly and blue coconut cakes; men roasted entrails over low fires in the middle of the street. Jean knew why she was drawn to this riot of sensations—for the bodies other than her own.

  Beside her stood the only covered section of the market, on stilts, above this teeming life. And it was teeming death. Whole animals swung from iron hooks in the meat market, thick with sensuality and rot. Every corner of this longhouse had an entrance, at the top of a rickety wooden staircase, each door marked by a sign for illiterates that showed a single painted image: goat, cow, fish, fowl. So, she thought, utterly desolate, here, as everywhere, you had to follow the correct flow—go out of the building and down the steps and then up again to reenter by the proper door if it was some other creature you were after. Before you could begin, you had to know how you’d end. You had to know what you wanted. Head-down buying: humorlessly pointing, bargaining. This was a tug-of-war—the very thing she couldn’t bring herself to do.