Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

The lines, as usual, were long and extremely slow going into the island’s airport. Immigration officials considered each passport with an impassive but somehow insulting deliberateness. It was also possible, given the quality of local schooling, that they found it difficult to read. Lines for departure from the island were also, equally, slow, but they had about them always something of the frantic. Reservations, clearly marked on tickets and many times confirmed, were somehow missing from passenger lists; or even if they appeared on the lists, where passengers, reading upside down, could clearly see them, the airline employee would look up, with that impassivity, that insulting deliberation, and repeat that there was no record of the passenger’s name, that the passenger could wait, if he liked, on standby, for this flight or for the next in six hours’ time. It hardly mattered which island it was. Barbados. St. Thomas. Tortola. Martinique. Visitors, particularly those who most deplored the quality of island food, liked to say the French islands were different. But they were not. With the exception of Jamaica and Grenada, where violence was overt, the islands were the same.

What you found in all these places was, of course, the clear, warm sea, the sun, the long white beaches; and, in the water, always in recent years, at least one young, possibly feeble-minded black person, smiling, playing with himself. Nearby, a large, loud transistor, a group of young blacks, some in bathing suits, a few in trousers, chattering in the island patois, moving gradually nearer a sunbathing young white woman, or a sunbathing white couple, until that woman or that couple, whose intention had evidently been to stay at some distance from the others, picked up their towels and moved toward the groups around the beach umbrellas, where the other white people were. Elsewhere on the beach, not all day but inevitably by noon, a second group of blacks, young, laughing, wading deep, splashing, shouting, embracing, taunting, concealing in a kind of ostentatious, faked exuberance, the fact, true of so many places with sought-after resorts, sought-after beaches, that no native islanders knew how to swim. These were the tensions of arriving, staying, leaving. On the heavily frequented islands, where people went for nightclubs, gambling, golf, hotels. And on the remote, secluded islands of rented and guarded houses. Where people came to be undisturbed. And then became restless after dinner.

Look here.

How could I know that every time you had a chance to choose you would choose the other thing?

Do you know, he said, I have not made love with anyone since I first made love with you. I said, Not anyone? He said no. I said, Neither have I. And there we were. And why is it not enough, for people of diffidence, hesitation and reserve, to let it go, to let it be now, this way, for the rest of our lives? Well, perhaps I am wrong now. But every once in a while since the year we met, no, not met, since we didn’t for so long even like each other, since the year, then, that we began to go to bed together, I said that someday, in spring or autumn, I’d like to go to New Orleans. I had never been there. And you said, each time you said, Why I’ll take you there, that’s easy. In the sixth year, in August, I went to New Orleans by myself. It was all right, though it was hot, since it was August. I just hadn’t thought it through. I invented errands, talked to those judges, spent a few days. It didn’t matter. Then, from time to time, I began to say, You know, someday we ought to go somewhere for a weekend. Not for work, as when we fly to Cleveland, Chicago, or Atlanta, and we have an early dinner there or else I wait at the motel while you have dinner with the local people, and the next day I read while you do the work you came for, and the next night, or two nights later, we fly back. But a weekend of calm, as though you were in your houses, on your islands, your long walks. Sometimes, you said, I will, we’ll do that. Once or twice, you said, We’ll see. It became a sort of joke between us, that weekend. Sometimes it was reduced to just dinner at a restaurant in Pennsylvania, not far from the place where you sometimes spend a few days fishing; but we never went there, either. Other dinners, not that one. And it began to matter. I don’t know why. A child’s thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure you can say, as a not inconsiderable man to a grown woman, We’ll see.

And then one night, when you were about to leave for the island where you spend your weeks at Christmas, and your wife was already there but your children, the last of whom has now grown up, were not this year going with you, I said, I’m afraid I said, You know, we wouldn’t have to make love as much as this in a night, in a single night after a day of tiredness and errands, and before an early morning of more errands and long absence, we wouldn’t have to make love as much as this in a single night if someday we had a week. It was late. We were drunk, though not very. And then I said, You know. You said, What. I said, I guess we are never going to have a week. And then I’m afraid I wept. We were quiet then, as we usually are. But there are things you can say, I think, or suggest, or even contemplate aloud just once. And I had begun. So I said, because after all these years I had to say something, though it may be far too late to say it, When it’s time for me to go, do you want me to ask you or tell you or should I just quietly go. You said, But I don’t want you to go, I need you here. I said, No, and in a way you’ve wanted me to go for years, and I’ve known it, but I just couldn’t do it. Then you said, not speaking as to a child any longer, But you can’t go, everything will just disintegrate if you go. I was touched, and I said whatever I said, about how bored you are sometimes. You said, But you always have something new to tell me; and if you go I’ll just shrivel up, I’ll just shrivel up like a prune. We went to sleep. And by morning, of course, you had forgotten. Remembered by afternoon, I think, only that I had been unhappy, remembered a phrase or two, but remembered by then as though it were a childhood thing, one of your daughters homesick at school, perhaps, or briefly sentimental at parting when you and their mother went away, or, more recently, when they went away themselves, to their men or their jobs, abroad. So it was only as if I had said once again that while you were gone I would miss you. And we have said that so often, everyone says it, in such a formula way, it has almost no meaning. And to make me feel better, you said again that you loved me, and gave me, as a sort of Christmas present, that word about your having made love only with me in all these years. And I could not, how could I, turn away, so I just said, Not anyone? and then, Neither have I.

We had drinks and dinner early, because you had to get home, after your tiring day, in time to be picked up for your morning flight. And we talked, as we do, of the news, and our errands, and maybe something comic in them. Then, since I couldn’t stay with you, or you with me, on account of the driver in the morning, you took me home, and I gave you a chicken liver for your dog and a pill for the night, and you gave me some letters to mail. After which, I’m afraid, I cried again. You seemed bewildered by that. I said, You know, the thing is you build your life a bit. And you said, The thing is it’s built. After midnight, and this is very unusual for us, you called and said you loved me, and I said whatever I said, also Catch a lot of fish on your island, and that I would see you when you got back.

I only don’t know if I will see you when you get back. That is all that is wrong, or some of what’s wrong. That I shouldn’t be here when you get back, that I ought not to have been here many times before, that I know and knew that with anything I have of instinct or of wisdom. The Germans say no one can jump over his own shadow, and I used to rationalize, no, not rationalize, think, that I couldn’t ask you to jump outside your way. But what I’m afraid I’ve done is lost, lost you something, lost me something, lost us, by what I did not insist, a possibility. Because there is no reason in the world why, in eight years, we have never had, and we will never have, a week. And because I am not one of your daughters, nor one of your assistants, nor your wife, nor a dependent friend or colleague, nor a litigant clamoring for your attention, nor a politician who seeks your advice. Or even, as I once said, in the dark, with a smile, a secretary or a blonde in a chorus line with whom you are having an affair. You said you wouldn’t be having an affair with either of the last two, but the truth is, we would probably be better off if you were. If I were that secretary or that blonde, though as you say your life is built, you would have to find room, make some kind of room. The weeks on the north island in summer, the other island in winter, the hunting and walking weekends, even the occasional junket to the Riviera or to London. Somehow not with me, not with me. Not Christmas, of course, or birthdays, which I know don’t really matter. I just don’t know quite how I let it happen. Perhaps I had no choice, or perhaps you never loved me quite enough, and I didn’t want to know.