The collected stories (6 page)

He pinched it lovingly. 'It's only a tattoo.'

That seemed worse than a live spider, which had the merit of being able to dance away. I told him this, adding, 'Am I being fastidious?'

'No, ethnocentric,' he said. 'My mother has a mango on her knee.'

'Not a banjo?' When I saw him wince, I said, 'Forgive me, Floyd. Do go on - I want to hear everything.'

'There's too much to tell.'

'I know the feeling.'

'I wouldn't mind a hamburger,' he said suddenly. 'I'm starving.'

Instead of telling him I had cassoulet waiting for him in East Sandwich, I slowed down. It is the fat, not the thin, who are always famished; and he had not had a hamburger in two years. But the sight of fast food woke a memory in him. As he watched the disc of meat slide down a chute to be bunned, gift wrapped, and clamped into a small styrofoam valise, he treated me to a meticulous description of the method of cooking in Samoa. First, stones were heated, he said, then the hot stones buried in a hole. The uncooked food was wrapped in leaves and placed on the stones. More hot stones were piled on top. Before he got to the part where the food, stones, and leaves were disinterred, I said, 'I understand that's called labor intensive, but it doesn't sound terribly effective.'

He gave me an odd look and excused himself, taking his little valise of salad to the drinking fountain to wash it.

'We always wash our food before we eat.'

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I said, 'Raccoons do that!'

It was meant as encouragement, but I could see I was not doing at all well.

Back at the house, Floyd dug a present out of his bag. You sat on it, this fiber mat. 'One of your miracle fibers?' I said. 'Tell me more!' But he fell silent. He demurred when I mentioned tennis, and at my suggestion of an afternoon of recreational shopping he grunted. He said, 'We normally sleep in the afternoon.' Again I was a bit startled by the plural pronoun and glanced around, half expecting to see another dusky islander. But no - Floyd's was the brotherly folk 'we' of the native, affirming the cultural freemasonry of all Polynesia. And it had clearly got into his bones. He had acquired an almost catlike capacity for slumber. He lay for hours in the lawn hammock, swinging like a side of beef, and at sundown entered the house yawning and complaining of the cold. It was my turn to laugh: the thermometer on the deck showed eighty-one degrees.

'I'll bet you wish you were at Trader Vic's,' I said over the cassoulet, trying to avert my ethnocentric gaze as Floyd nibbled the beans he seized with his fingers. He turned my Provencal cuisine into a sort of astronaut's pellet meal.

He belched hugely, and guessing that this was a ritual rumble of Samoan gratitude, I thanked him.

'Ironic, isn't it?' I said. 'You seem to have managed marvelously out there in the Pacific, taking life pretty much as you found it. And I can't help thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson, who went to Samoa with his sofas, his tartans, his ottoman, and every bagpipe and ormolu clock from Edinburgh in his luggage.'

'How do you know that?' he asked.

'Vassar,' I said. 'There wasn't any need for Stevenson to join a Samoan family. Besides his wife and his stepson, there were his stepdaughter and her husband. His wife was a divorcee, but she was from California, which explains everything. Oh, he brought his aged mother out, too. She never stopped starching her bonnets, so they say.'

'Tusitala,' said Floyd.

'Come again?'

'That was his title. "Teller of tales." He read his stories to the Samoans.'

'I'd love to know what they made of "Weir of Hermiston."' It

world's end

was clear from Floyd's expression that he had never heard of the novel.

He said gamely, 'I didn't finish it.'

'That's not surprising - neither did Stevenson. Do much reading, Floyd?'

'Not a lot. We don't have electricity, and reading by candlelight is really tough.'

'"Hermiston" was written by candlelight. In Samoa. It would be an act of the greatest homage to the author to read it that way.'

'I figured it was pointless to read about Samoa if you live there.'

'All the more reason to read it, since it's set in eighteenth-century Scotland.'

'And he was a palagi.'

'Don't be obscure, Floyd.'

'A white man.'

Only in the sense that Pushkin was an octoroon and Othello a soul brother, I thought, but I resisted challenging Floyd. Indeed, his saturation in the culture had made him indifferent to the bizarre. I discovered this when I drew him out. What was the food like after it was shoveled from beneath the hot stones? On Floyd's report it was uninspired: roots, leaves, and meat, sweated together in this subterranean sauna. What kind of meat? Oh, all kinds; and with the greatest casualness he let it drop that just a week before, he had eaten a flying fox.

'On the wing?' I asked.

'They're actually bats,' he said. 'But they call them-'

'Do you mean to tell me that you have eaten a bat?'

'You act as if it's an endangered species,' he said.

'I should think Samoans are if that's part of their diet.'

'They're not bad. But they cook them whole, so they always have a strange expression on their faces when they're served.'

'Doesn't surprise me a bit. Turn up their noses, do they?'

'Sort of. You can see all their teeth. I mean, the bats'.'

'What a stitch!'

He smiled. 'You think that's interesting?'

'Floyd, it's matchless.'

Encouraged, he said, 'Get this - we use fish as fertilizer. Fish!'

'That's predictable enough,' I said, unimpressed. 'Not far from where you are now, simple folk put fresh fish on their vegetable gardens as fertilizer. Misguided? Maybe. Wasteful? Who knows?

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Such was the nature of subsistence farming on the Cape three hundred years ago. One thing, though - they knew how to preach a sermon. Your agriculturalist is so often a God-fearing man.'

This cued Floyd into an excursion on Samoan Christianity, which sounded to me thoroughly homespun and basic, full of a good-natured hypocrisy that took the place of tolerance.

I said, 'That would make them - what? Unitarians?'

Floyd belched again. I thanked him. He wiped his fingers on his shirtfront and said it was time for bed. He was not used to electric light: the glare was making him belch. 'Besides, we always go to bed at nine.'

The hammering some minutes later was Floyd rigging up the hammock in the spare room, where there was a perfectly serviceable double bed.

'We never do,' I called.

Floyd looked so dejected at breakfast, toying with his scrambled egg and sausage, that I asked him if it had gone cold. He shrugged. Everything was hunky-dory, he said in Samoan, and then translated it.

'What do you normally have for breakfast?'

'Taro.'

'Is it frightfully good for you?'

'It's a root,' he said.

'Imagine finding your roots in Samoa!' Seeing him darken, I added, 'Carry on, Floyd. I find it all fascinating. You're my window on the world.'

But Floyd shut his mouth and lapsed into silence. Later in the morning, seeing him sitting cross-legged in the parlor, I was put in mind of one of those big lugubrious animals that look so homesick behind the bars of American zoos. I knew I had to get him out of the house.

It was a mistake to take him to the supermarket, but this is hindsight; I had no way of anticipating his new fear of traffic, his horror of crowds, or the chilblains he claimed he got from air conditioning. The acres of packaged foods depressed him, and his reaction to the fresh-fruit department was extraordinary.

'One fifty-nine!' he jeered. 'In Samoa, you can get a dozen bananas for a penny. And look at that,' he said, handling a whiskery coconut. 'They want a buck for it!'

WORLD S END

'They're not exactly in season here on the Cape, Floyd.'

'I wouldn't pay a dollar for one of those.'

'I had no intention of doing so.'

'They're dangerous, coconuts,' he mused. 'They drop on your head. People have been known to be killed by them.'

'Not in Barnstable County,' I said, which was a pity, because I felt like aiming one at his head and calling it an act of God.

He hunched over a pyramid of oranges, examining them with distaste and saying that you could buy the whole lot for a quarter in a village market he knew somewhere in remote Savai'i. A tray of mangoes, each fruit the rich color of old meerschaum, had Floyd gasping with contempt: the label stuck to their skins said they were two dollars apiece, and he had never paid more than a nickel for one.

'These cost two cents,' he said, bruising a grapefruit with his thumb, 'and they literally give these away,' he went on, flinging a pineapple back onto its pile. But his disbelief was nothing compared to the disbelief of shoppers, who gawped at his lava-lava. Yet his indignation at the prices won these people over, and amid the crashing of carts I heard the odd shout of 'Right on!'

Eventually I hauled him away, and past the canned lychees ('They grow on trees in China, Floyd!') I became competitive. 'What about split peas?' I said, leading him down the aisles. 'Scallops? Indian pudding? Dreft? Clorox? What do you pay for dog biscuits? Look, be reasonable. What you gain on mangoes, you lose on maple syrup!'

We left empty-handed. Driving back, I noticed that Floyd had become even gloomier. Perhaps he realized that it was going to be a long summer. I certainly did.

'Anything wrong, Floyd?'

He groaned. He put his head in his hands. 'Aunt Freddy, I think I've got culture shock.'

isn't that something you get at the other end? I mean, when the phones don't work in Nigeria or you find ants in the marmalade or the grass hut leaks?'

'Our huts never leak.'

'Of course not,' I said. l And look, this is only a palagi talking, but I have the unmistakable feeling that you would be much happier among your own family, Floyd/

We both knew which family. Mercifully, he was gone the next

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day, leaving nothing behind but the faint aroma of coconut oil in the hammock. He never asked where I got the price of the Hyannis-Apia airfare. He accepted it with a sort of extortionate Third Worlder's wink, saying, That's very Samoan of you, Aunt Freddy.' But I'll get it back. Fortunately, there are ways of raising money at short notice around here.

Algebra

Ronald had threatened to move out before, but I always begged him not to. He knew he had power over me. He was one of those people who treats flattery as if it is mockery, and regards insult as a form of endearment. You couldn't talk to him. He refused to be praised, and if I called him 'Fanny' he only laughed. I suppose he knew that basically he was worthless, which led him to a kind of desperate boasting about his faults - he even boasted about his impotence. What Ronnie liked best was to get drunk on the cheap wine he called 'Parafino' and sprawl on the chaise and dig little hornets out of his nose and say what scum most people were. I knew he was bad for me and that I would have another breakdown if things went on like this much longer.

'God's been awful good to me,' he said once in the American accent he affected when he was drunk.

'That's blasphemy,' I said. 'You don't mean that. You'll go to Hell.'

'Wrong!' he shrieked. 'If you do mean it you'll go to Hell.'

When I met him he had just joined Howletts, the publisher. Quite early on, he began to sneer at the parties he sometimes took me to by boasting that he could go to one every day of the week. I thought he had a responsible position but afterwards, when I got to know the others, particularly Philippa and Roger, I came to realize that he was a rather insignificant person in the firm. I think this is why he seemed so embarrassed to have me along and took me so seldom. He implied that I wasn't attractive or intelligent enough for his publishing friends, and he would not let me near the real writers.

'This is Michael Insole, a friend,' he'd say, never letting on that we were living together in my flat. That sort of thing left me feeling incredibly depressed.

Then everything changed. I have not really analyzed it until now. It certainly wasn't an idea - nothing as solemn or calculated as that. It was more an impulse, a frenzy you might say, or a leap in

ALGEBRA

the dark. At one of the parties I was talking to Sir Charles Moon-man, the novelist and critic. 'And what do you do?' he asked me. At another time I might have said, 'I live with Ronald Brill,' but I was feeling so fed up with Ronnie I said, 'Basically, I'm a writer.'

'Do I know your work?' asked Sir Charles.

'No,' I said. It was the truth. I worked then, as I do now, at the Arcade Off-License near the Clapham South tube station, but living with Ronnie had made me want to go into writing.

Sir Charles found my prompt reply very funny, and then an odd thing happened. He relaxed and began to talk and talk. He was hugely old and had the downright manner and good health of a country doctor. He was reading Kingsley, he said, and squeezed air with his hands. He described the book, but it was nothing like any Kingsley I had ever read. He said, 'It has, don't you agree, just the right tone, an elasticity one associates with fiction -' I nodded and tried to add something of my own, but could not get a word in.

At this point, Virginia Byward, the novelist and traveler, ambled over and said hello.

'This is Mister Insole. He's a writer,' said Sir Charles. 'We've just been talking about Kinglake.'

Kinglake, not Kingsley. I was glad I had not said anything.

'Eothen? That Kinglake?' said Miss Byward.

'The Invasion of the Crimea. That Kinglake,' said Sir Charles.

'Well, I'll let you two get on with it,' said Miss Byward, laughing at her mistake. 'Very nice to have met you, Mister Insole.'

'She's so sweet,' said Sir Charles. 'And her reportage is devastating.' He clawed at his cuff. 'Bother. It's gone eight. I must rush -dinner engagement.'

'I'll be late for mine, as well,' I said. 'My hostess will tear a strip off me.' But I was not going anywhere.

'Such a bore, isn't it?' he said. 'We are both being called away. So unfortunate. I would much rather stand and chat about the Crimean War.'