to Vangie. She was about five inches tall, beautifully made. The clerk took it out of the case for us. Black hair was glued in place, and the kimono was sewed on. We bought it. At Kelly's Hardware we bought a spool of fine wire, a piece of soft sculptor's stone, a file and a carving knife.
We repaired to the pleasantly dark bar at the Carlton House on East Street. When the bartender had fixed us each one of their superb planter's punches and moved away, Meyer said, 'I am extremely nervous, Trav. This is a long way from economic theory. I'm certain I'm going to make some terrible blunder.'
I realized he could not function in a vacuum and play it by ear as we went along. People need an identity, a place to stand. I said, 'McGee and Meyer are both from Fort Lauderdale. They came over separately. Meyer had some talks with people on the Nassau Development Board about the economic consequences of a change in the corporate tax structure or some damn thing, at your usual per them and expenses. McGee came over with a batch of people joining a big party going on at Paradise Beach and now that the party is running out of charge, he's heading home. We ran into each other on Bay Street. We're casual acquaintances. We're going back on the same ship, but you bore me. I'm more interested in lining up some dainty lollipop. Maybe I can get some mileage out of you by sticking your thumb in Ans Terry's buttonhole while I cut his lollipop out of the pack. Or maybe it might work the other way. The legendary Meyer charm might work well on the lollipop, while I trick Ans into going down to your squalid accommodations where I can thump his head and lace him to your bunk. Anyway, we establish a message center and get to work giving them the eerie feeling there is something gone wrong in the world, a warp in reality, some cogs slipping in their skulls. They're ice-cold, Meyer. Heartless and murderous. But any savage animal gets bad nerves when confronted with the inexplicable. We just give them a Halloween party, with a few goblins to think about.'
'That particular smile, McGee. I am very glad you have no good reason to come looking for one Meyer. Okay, I feel better. Skoal!'
We stood in the dusty shade and watched them, with casual skill, latch the Monica D. to the wharf. She was dressed up to come in, flapping with as many pennants and flags and banners as three new gas stations on opening day. Deck crew in whites, and the packed, expectant, gaudy, gabbling pack of passengers crowding the starboard side of B Deck where the gangplank would be affixed. This was the last romantic port of call, and I could well imagine that their cruise director had made some dampening comments about shopping on Bay Street. This is standard procedure. The cruise directors hawk the marvels of the wares at those ports where they have set up a kickback from the shops. At St. Thomas and Kingston the cruise directors give glowing recommendations about specific shops. But they can't pry any kickbacks out of Bay Street because it is too well, too solidly established, too world- renowned to give a hoot. The big machine chews up the people, but it gives fair value.
Four hours ashore at the mercy of the machine. Five big taxis were waiting, an indication that there were a few who had signed up for a tour of the island.
The chain was dropped, and as the harried staff checked them off, the folk came hurrying down the gangplank. In the lead was an overstrength platoon of the same beefy arid resolute women you see bursting into department stores on sale days the instant the doors are unlocked. Great hams bulged the lurid shorts.
'Attention please, attention please. Passengers taking the tour will please board the limousines off to your left as you debark. Thank you.'
The ship's last cruise of the season, a short one, at the lowest rates. Yet it was at only a little more than half capacity, they had told me. During the height of the season, in the first three months of any year, when these small cruise ships that ply the Caribbean are at capacity, a good two-thirds of the passenger list is made up of what a friend of mine who worked aboard one for a season called the 'mother' trade. To explain what he meant, he would give you a big expansive smile and say, 'I always promised Mother that some day I'd take her on a cruise. Well, sir, with the kids married off and the store sold, I said to her, I said, 'Mother, you better start packing, because we're a-going on that cruise.''
So they fill up the little ships, eat the spiced and stylized cruise food, get seasick, sunburned. They take afternoon dance lessons in the Neapolitan Ballroom, play organized deck games, splash about in the small pool on the sundeck, play bridge, get a little tiddly and giggly, dress up for dinner and appraise the dresses of the other women, get totally confused about which port is which, take fragmentary language lessons, vigorously applaud the meager talents of the ship's floor show, take all the tours, write and mail scores of postcards, compete for prizes in the costume ball, spend a dutiful amount of time each day at sea in the rental deck chair.
In the brochures, of course, there were the beautiful people dancing gracefully and romantically by moonlight and the light of Japanese lanterns on the tropic deck of a brand-new ship, and the same lovely people smiling in the warm sunlight, their golden limbs in relaxed and effective composition around the huge shipboard swimming pool.
It isn't like that. These little ships arc lumpy with endless coats of topside paint, and the ship's staff is overworked, and the schedules are rigidly set, with brassy announcements coming over the speaker systems, sending the whole herd moving in one direction or another.
It isn't like they thought. But it isn't like anything else they ever knew either. Perhaps, in some wistful and tender sense, these are the beautiful people, and because this is the dream fulfilled, they hold onto it tightly, making small translations from reality. And down there, in the cramped inconveniences of the little cabins, in the slightly oily wind of the ship's air-conditioning, in the muted grumble of the ship's engines, the little vibrational shudders as she crosses the tropic ocean, sunburned flesh is coupled in a passion more like that of years ago, and in the breakfast morning they smile into each other's eyes, a secret recognition.
But this was the tag end of the season, and a mixed bag. Scampering flocks of small children. A sprinkling of heavy men in their middle years, accompanying, with a certain air of apprehension, their young doughy blondes toward the Bay Street shops. A contingent of scrubbed-looking highschool kids chaperoned by a nervous-acting couple who looked like a male and female Woodrow Wilson, and an unchaperoned pack of kids of college age, the girls like a bright fluttering flock of tropic birds, the boys languid under the terrible burden of improvised sophistication, and thirty or forty couples of the 'mother' classification. The tour caravan left. The others dispersed into Bay Street. The machine came to life. It could readily chew up the entire passenger lists of four deluxe cruise ships simultaneously, each one better than twice the size of the little Monica D. The saloons turned the music on. The strawmarket women began their sales patter, waving the merchandise, and making crude comments about the Jamaican hats a lot of cruise people were wearing. These people were a tiny morsel for the machine, a hundred and fifty or so, but with proper pressure, calibration, alignment of the rollers and levers and sluice gates, it might churn eight thousand dollars out of this motley group, and there was little else to do on a Monday afternoon in June anyway. The mystique of the operation is that a true-blue consumer will buy something she does not need and cannot afford when she discovers that the same item at home would cost her thirty dollars more.
Our targets were not in the pack, and just as I was about to say we'd better go aboard, she started slowly down the gangplank. Unmistakably she. Theatrically she, making her exit after the rabble had been cleared from her path.
White cotton twill pants, fitting her slenderness with an almost improbable snugness. They came to just above her bare ankles, with a slight flare, an instep notch. The wide waistband was snugged around her slender waist, and above it was six supple bare inches of midriff, and above that a little half-sleeve truncated blouse, fine red and white stripes, so dense with stiff ruffles she looked like a Christmas display of ribbon candy. Atop the interwoven and intricate coiffure of cream-blonde hair was perched at a perfect straightness a wide-brimmed, white bullfighter hat of straw in a fine weave, with white ball fringe dangling all the way around the rim. She carried a red purse shaped like a lunch bucket. Her sandals had half-heels, white straps, thick cork soles. The very wide flat rims of her sunglasses had a red and white checkerboard pattern.
She came slowly down the incline of the gangplank, the slope creating, with the thick soles of the sandals, considerably more hip motion than she could have achieved on a level surface. Every crew member who could get to a rail on the starboard side stopped all work and watched the descent. The only discernible flaw in her figure was that her thighs, as revealed by the tightness of the pants, were too long and too heavy to be in proportion to the rest of her. She was slightly tanned, just enough to set off the smoothness between waistband and blouse. I could sense the concerted inaudible sigh as she reached the level of the cement dock. She walked with a sense of complete awareness of being watched, looking straight ahead, undeviatingly. It was a triumph of merchandising, a perfect gem of functional display techniques, as specific as the cutaway working models of engines at auto shows.
She turned and looked back up at the deck. A big man appeared and came down toward her. He had a long, limber stride, a small waist and hips under white stretch Levis, and great wads of muscle bulging the navy blue knit sports shirt. His pale forearms had almost the exaggerated meatiness of Popeye the Sailor, nd he held himself and moved in a way that betrayed those curious anxieties. He had a face far older than the body, long, eroded and sallow, with rows and lashes of such pallor it had an expressionless look. There was something just
