Джойс Оутс - Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars

Descending by slow creaking degrees in the gilt cage elevator. Suitcases, Hugo’s backpack, a hotel porter speaking rapidly to them in Spanish.

Interior of a taxi. Hugo is helping her inside. Less than twenty-four hours ago they’d come from the airport in a taxi very like this, now they are departing Quito.

Almost, Jessalyn feels a pang of regret. Somewhere behind her and lost to her now, the shadowy cave where Whitey had awaited her. Yet, it has not happened that way.

Obscuring half her face, a pair of dark-lensed sunglasses that Hugo has secured on her, to shield her eyes from the white-glaring sun.

On this bumpy ride they are being taken in the taxi to the airport outside town. Descending a long winding hill past lush vegetation.

Hugo has been telling her laughingly no, of course he hadn’t left her. Only to make travel arrangements. Only to take a half-dozen quick photographs in the street. The taxi brings them to the airport which is a few hundred feet lower than Quito, miraculously the pain in Jessalyn’s head begins to lessen.

She is not so nauseated now. Hugo insists that she try to drink bottled water, in small mouthfuls.

The small plane taxis along the runway like a frantic shorebird. It does not seem believable to Jessalyn that the plane will ascend into the air, rattling terribly, one of its wings dipping lower than the other, and yet within minutes they are rattling/humming aloft, and the glamorous air flight attendants are on their feet in the aisle, bravely smiling. And here the miracle increases, for the air pressure in the cabin allows her to breathe once again. Almost, she can feel the tight-tangled blood vessels in her brain begin to untangle.

The plane lurches!—at once, murmurs of alarm, and amusement at the alarm, ripple through the cabin.

Flying west, to the coastal city of Guayaquil. A quick flight, within an hour Jessalyn’s headache has faded. In the resort city she is able to walk leaning on Hugo’s arm, along the sun-splotched quay. Here are palm trees, crimson and purple bougainvillea. Paradise! To her surprise Jessalyn is very hungry.

Hugo is relieved that Jessalyn has recovered so swiftly. Several times he stops her to kiss her eyelids, her hair.

So worried about you, darling! Sick with worry.

Jessalyn perceives in Hugo a man who has been a husband and a father: a protector. She had not witnessed him sick with worry in the past.

She is giddy with love for him. Slipping her arms around him, in this public place. Kissing his mouth, the silly mustache. Love for the tall startled smiling man who’d brought her to a terrible place but has now saved her from it.

“MARRY ME, DARLING! TODAY.”

It is not the first time that Hugo has suggested marriage. And Jessalyn has not known how to reply.

But—I am already married. I thought you understood…

But today is different. Laughing together at lunch on the quay, in the open air. Both are very hungry, in fact ravenous. Jessalyn has never been so hungry in her life.

Awaiting their food, tearing at crusts of thick dark bread.

Hears herself say yes of course, she will marry him.

It is very sudden. It is not at all sudden, it has been prepared with the fanatic care with which a small garden is tilled, seeded, planted.

“But do you love me?”—wistfully Hugo asks her.

“Of course I love you. Yes.”

Hugo is astounded. But Hugo is tugging at his mustache, smiling.

“Oh, Jessalyn! Your family won’t approve. You had better consult them, darling.”

“No.” Jessalyn laughs, wildly—“I had better not consult them.”

A half-glass of wine has gone to her head. Indeed, her brain had almost killed her. Yet, her brain had not killed her. Whichever words she utters to this man gazing at her with adoration will become miraculously true.

It is so, Hugo Martinez has become precious to Jessalyn. Sometimes she feels that she has known him a very long time. That he has been waiting for her for a very long time.

And there is the prospect, of which Jessalyn doesn’t want to think, of Hugo one day becoming ill, being hospitalized. And if so, Jessalyn must be the wife .

For there are places where if you are not a spouse or a relative, if there is not a legal contract defining your relationship, you may not be allowed at the bedside of your stricken companion even if you are all that he has.

Even now in the sun-splotched restaurant on the quay she is thinking of Whitey marooned in a hospital room, white walls, white sheets, shut doors, in the middle of the night no one there to hold him, comfort him.

It will not happen again. Not another time, her husband will die alone and not in her arms.

Not altogether seriously at first Hugo makes inquiries at the U.S. consulate on the Avenue Rodriguez Bonin near their hotel. The consulate is housed in a handsome old brick colonial town house set back in a meticulously landscaped park and surrounded by a five-foot wrought iron fence. Broad avenues lined with royal palms and bougainvillea, opulent rose gardens, stucco mansions with orange-tiled roofs, expensive vehicles parked conspicuously at the curbs—this is a wealthy part of Guayaquil where everything resembles an advertisement in a glossy magazine.

Not Hugo’s kind of place, actually. Nothing that excites him to photograph. Yet, it is where he finds himself on this quest to be married.

(And how many times has Hugo Martinez been married? Jessalyn knows at least once, very likely twice. Beyond that?—she has not inquired, and she has not been told.)

All they need are their U.S. passports, they are informed by a smiling young receptionist in the consulate. The waiting time is twenty-four hours.

And so, twenty-four hours later Jessalyn and Hugo return to be married by the deputy chief of mission in his sun-filled office at the consulate. Do you, Jessalyn Sewell McClaren, take this man, Hugo Vincent Martinez, to be your lawful wedded husband… And do you, Hugo Vincent Martinez, take this woman… It is so vivid a scene, the deputy chief’s midwestern voice so warmly enthusiastic, the crimson stripes of the American flag so neon-bright, cries of tropical birds (parrots?) outside the window so piercing-sweet, Jessalyn has to instruct herself— But it is real! It is really happening.

Like the second, or was it the third, mammogram. Hold breath, hold breath, don’t release breath, continue to hold breath— Now. Relax.

Returned again to breathing. As she and Hugo manage to push rings (newly purchased, plain silver matching bands) onto each other’s finger and Hugo stoops to kiss her happily on the lips.

(Jessalyn has moved her older rings to her right hand. Practical, pragmatic, an act of betrayal? Yet, it is accomplished.)

“Don Bankwell”—deputy chief of mission at the U.S. consulate at Guayaquil—is an exceptionally friendly fellow American specially empowered to conduct marriage ceremonies for U.S. citizens as well as to perform other legal services for Americans abroad, which he clearly enjoys, and why would he not enjoy such an enviable job, in this sunlit residence on Avenue Rodriguez Bonin, far from the howling-cold January American Midwest; not likely to be an ambassador, or even a consul general, but rather a trusted assistant, one day (perhaps) to serve in a great capital city like Paris, London, Rome, if he remains well-liked by his superiors at the State Department, and praised by Americans traveling abroad who are likely to be from time to time well-to-do and influential Americans, with friends in the State Department to whom they might report impressions of “Don Bankwell.” And so Bankwell is eager to flatter Hugo and Jessalyn, and to introduce them to his administrative assistant, a dazzlingly beautiful young Ecuadorian woman who prepares the wedding documents and is a witness to the signatures.