Waking Up In Eden Part 7

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Mango Madness

AS I SETTLED MORE into Kauai, I became involved in the lives of new friends. So when the coconut wireless telegraphed the news that John Rapozo had throat cancer, I worried, even more when I heard that his doctor wanted to removed his vocal chords. The image of Big John without a voice struck me as impossibly unfair. His rough island pidgin, the authoritative commands leveled at other men, the sentences that grew quicker and tumbled together when he was excited - they were as much a part of John Rapozo as his calloused fingers.

I telephoned his home that night.

"John, what's going on?" "The doctor said he's going to cut. He said if he don't cut, it's going to be all over for me."

As I walked into Garden headquarters the next morning, Dr. Klein was bent over his secretary's desk, arranging flights to Honolulu. He had gone into his memory banks of all the hundreds of people he had charmed over the years. He remembered a prominent cancer research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Magically, John Rapozo had an appointment tomorrow with the best cancer doctor in Honolulu. Dr. Klein quietly paid for John's airfares.

After a week of tests in Honolulu, John announced that there would be no surgery. He now spoke in a scratchy whisper, as radiation treatment had begun. "The doctor, he laid down the law," he said. "No more smoking. And he said I've got to lose weight and eat right. I'll never sing again. But I'll talk."

As often happens in crisis, our friendship deepened during the hard coming months.

THE TRADE WINDS had arrived from the northeast Pacific, exhaling their soft, welcoming breezes, blowing out the recent humidity, and tempering the hot tropical sun with puffs of clouds. The trades transform summer from unbearable to paradise, and bring a lightness and sparkle to the air, particularly on Kauai.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, I walked into the clear morning air to join James outside the cottage. He seemed to have realized that I would not change his routine or duties, so he had relaxed and started showing me the treasures in my yard. James plucked a couple of low leaves from the lollipop-shaped "Autograph Tree." Using a blunt pencil, he scratched my name on a shiny leaf. A half hour later, the letters developed bright and clear, like a print in a photo lab. The macadamia trees had started to drop dark brown, globe-shaped nuts. When their thick husks split, they revealed hard marbles. My trusty Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery, source for solving all cooking conundrums, warned that the hard sh.e.l.l would crack an ordinary nutcracker. When I told James this, he laughed. "You got to find a rock with a little dent in it, put it in, smash it. Don't eat too many, you get trots." The lychee trees now bore cherry-sized pink b.a.l.l.s with a hard rind covered with spikes. Their cloudy white flesh resembles a peeled grape. The mango trees grew thousands of elongated oblong fruit of dark jade that blushed yellow, bronze, and reddish. James sniffed dismissively at them. "Water mangos. Watery inside," he said. On Kauai the prized mangos are Haydens. The gardening staff carefully monitor the Hayden trees in Allerton Garden. When the mangos turn into a red ripeness, the fruit mysteriously disappears.

But plenty of people liked my mangos. My friend Jeanie came over with her own bags and took away dozens. She sent some of them back, in the form of Mango Betty, made just like the apple version, although tangier. Rick Hanna picked a year's supply to freeze for mango smoothies. Not content to reach the lower branches, he used a picker on an extension pole to go after perfect specimens at the top. We peeled them with potato peelers at my kitchen sink, then sliced and bagged chunks until our hands were almost raw.

Sometimes locals came and asked for permission to cut some of the bamboo shoots that lined the hill drive. I had pestered James several times to dig up some shoots so I could see how to eat them myself. He disapproved: "Shoots are bamboo keikis (babies). Dig up all the keikis and pretty soon, no more bamboo."

All the same, today he went to the tool shed and came out with a machete. We walked up and down the bamboo tunnel, searching for young stalks. James kneeled by a thick, pointed spear that looked as tough as a rhinoceros horn. He whacked it off near the ground and handed me a two-foot shoot. Not satisfied, he sheared off a more tender, one-foot spear. I boiled and boiled it, until it turned a translucent pink and tasted awful. Later, John Rapozo counseled that I should have frequently changed the cooking water.

I continued to ask James questions about the Allertons, feints and advances which he usually resisted. Despite a growing obsession with unraveling the Allerton story, I could find few clues about them or their lives. Robert and John Allerton lived guardedly. I began tracking down Garden scientists, employees, friends, and others who knew the Allertons in their later years but found that the two Allertons left little evidence of their interior lives. Their only record was a material one, of their elegant possessions, many now in museums. Scholars in the tiny, growing field of gay and lesbian history say h.o.m.os.e.xuals who lived through eras of prejudice or banishment typically destroyed incriminating diaries or other records. Gay history must be written by inference and a.n.a.logy, pieced together from slim hints and clues.

I tried James again. To my surprise, he returned the next day bearing a stack of sc.r.a.pbooks.

James began working as a gardener for the Allertons in the mid-1950s. After two years, the Allertons called him to work in the house. "They wanted me to start immediately, serving lunch to guests that day," James remembered. "I told them I had to go home and get my fancy clothes. John said, 'No, no,' and took me into his room and gave me shirt and shoes. They were so big on me, I look like a clown. Then they show me, 'Do this, do that, take the dishes this way.' They had these tiny little coffee cups - what you call them, demita.s.se? I had never seen them before in my life. So I serve them, so nervous the spoons rattle on the plates." James's wife, Sarah, started doing laundry for the Allertons, and then Robert said she had better come inside, too. In those days, the house was often full of houseguests, mostly men, creating undercurrents of jealousy.

"James, what did you all think about all that?" I asked.

"Whatever they do, they do," he said. James had tremendous admiration for Robert and John Allerton.

Anyone of import who could get the right introduction w.a.n.gled a visit to Lawai-Kai. Jackie Kennedy alighted from a helicopter on the beach, just in time for a tour and c.o.c.ktails. Robert showed her his collection of ballet books. James met John Wayne and other stars who filmed movies at Lawai-Kai. When Richard Nixon stopped by, John asked James to take pictures of him talking with the president, and James showed me his photo alb.u.ms to prove it.

"I've seen poor and I've seen rich, and I like poor better," was James's conclusion. "The rich, all they talk about is money, money, money. I seen. I served them all. They would be invited for nice meal, nice time, and then they would want something, ask them for something. That's how it works."

James drove off, done reminiscing for the day. I walked down to the giant mango tree. Rick had left his fruit-picking basket, and I extended it to its longest length. Above my head dangled a prize specimen. If I stood on my toes, I just might reach it. With a jiggle of the pole, the mango plopped into the basket. It was a moment of sweet happiness. I couldn't explain it, but even though I had few close friends yet, and grieved the deaths of my parents, I felt more alive, more healthy, and less lonely here than I did in Philadelphia. The insomnia that racked my nights in Philadelphia had disappeared, and I slept soundly through the night. Even my allergies had improved.

Isabella Bird had also sampled mangos. "The mango is an exotic fruit," she wrote, "and people think a great deal of it. . . . I think it tastes strongly of turpentine at first, but this is a heresy. The only way of eating it in comfort is to have a tub of water beside you. It should be eaten in private by any one who wishes to retain the admiration of his friends."

Now I spent much of my time outside the office in a bathing suit and flip-flops. Even the elastic strap of a swimsuit sometimes felt too restrictive, so alone on weekends at the cottage I'd wear only a pareo, a beach scarf, as a sarong. The scented breezes and easy lifestyle made me want to shed my old skin along with my clothes.

I was totally alone. I took off the swimsuit I wore for gardening and ate the mango naked. Why not? No one could see me. Juice ran down my arms, but I didn't care. I tentatively started a forgotten ballet step. Then it came back to me in a surge of remembrance, and I danced a waltz, spinning around the yard in leaps and pirouettes.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Last Tango in Paradise

ON MY MORNING JOGS, I kept running into the overs.e.xed Poseidon with whom I had shared the outdoor shower at Poipu Beach in my early days on Kauai. In my mind I called him "The Surfer." His name was Cal. One Sunday morning after a swim I confided to him that I wasn't quite sure about my snorkeling technique. "I float on the surface and look down, but I haven't figured out how to dive," I confessed. "I'm afraid that water will go down the tube."

"That's not so hard to learn. You want me to show you?"

"Yeah. That would be great."

"When do you want to go?"

"How about right now?

"Okay. I'll get my gear from the car."

I watched as he returned carrying a surfboard under one arm and a net bag of masks and snorkel tubes in the other hand. Barefoot, he wore only a faded pair of surfing jams. He carefully laid the board on the sand and dug one hand down the front of his swim trunks, pulling out a small plastic bag of bread crumbs. "Fish food," he explained.

He waded into the water, floating the surfboard. "Hold onto the board while you gain confidence," he instructed. Underwater, through my mask, I watched as he dove with powerful strokes, his hair floating around him in a nimbus, like an angel's. He released handfuls of food, drawing toward him mobs of fish. Small fish twisted and scattered in zigs and zags. Bigger ones raced to his hands, grabbing crumbs in dazzling antics.

Diving together, gesticulating underwater to a companion, and allowing myself to be pulled into deeper water reminded me of slow dancing. Our heads broke the surface at the same time and we reached for the board, breathing hard. One of his hands grazed mine as he grabbed hold, and the touch was warm, flush from the cold water that brought the blood to the surface.

"That was great," I said. "Can you show me how to blow the water out of the tube when I come up?"

"That's more advanced," he said judiciously. "You're getting tired. Do baby steps. You've had enough for today."

I nodded meekly. We got out of the water and toweled off, our bare skin close and salt-kissed. "Thanks a million," I said as I walked away. I had become accustomed to the order of my life and didn't entirely welcome the reentry of s.e.xual antic.i.p.ation. It generated fear as well as excitement, as it was both certain to be fulfilled if I wanted it to be, yet uncertain enough to be unpredictable, the kind of taut l.u.s.t that gathers force and speed until it becomes unstoppable. I remembered the febrile blood rise that could spill into a headlong, risky, full-speed-ahead torrent. Let loose, it could fly me to the moon or break me on the rocks below. Perhaps the only thing more dangerous would be to say no. I was aging. Sometimes I worried that I had forgotten how to do it anymore.

I turned and called out, "Come for lunch sometime."

THE NEXT WEEK he telephoned. "I'd like to take you up on your offer for lunch," he said.

"What do you like to eat?" I asked, immediately imagining luscious tropical fruits, a composed salad.

"Sandwiches," he said simply.

He arrived on Sat.u.r.day, a half hour early. I was outside, unloading my saddle from the car trunk, sweaty and disheveled after a morning ride.

"You're early," I yelped. "I'm filthy. You're going to have to wait while I take a shower." I shooed him to a chair and handed him a stack of magazines. "I'll be quick," I promised as I backed away, struck again by the power of his physicality.

Back in the kitchen, my hair damp and curled from bathroom steam, I hurriedly gathered sandwich ingredients and laid them on the counter. "Chicken all right?" I said in the over-bright voice of the nervous as he came into the room.

He didn't answer. From behind, his body circled mine, a bare tanned arm catching me by the waist and pulling me backward against him.

"Why don't I give you a back rub?" he whispered.

I laughed at the cliched pretense. "I don't think that's such a good idea," I said, intent on the lettuce.

In reply, he spun me around in one sure motion, laughing as he bent his head. Our mouths touched, our b.r.e.a.s.t.s cleaved, but I kept my feet a teenager's chaste distance away. With easy nonchalance, he reached up my skirt, cupped a cheek, and pressed me to him, from chest to knee. We spun and strained, I nearly gasping when he released me.

"Just a little back rub. It will relax you," he said levelly.

"Oh, no, no," I protested like a high school girl in the back of a car. He had unzipped my skirt and slipped it down to the floor. His hands roamed under my T-shirt as if I were already naked. Silently, he turned me against him and started walking us to the back of the house. In the small bedroom he pulled off my shirt with one hand, then turned to the bed and picked up two pillows, stacking one on top of the other. He released his own surfing jams with a pull of a string and kicked them off. Oh G.o.d, I heard myself say over and over, where did he learn this? I erupted so quickly, with such overheated response that I saw him smile in amus.e.m.e.nt. Then, over my shoulder, in the oval wall mirror, I glimpsed a reflection of him on his knees, his slim body so hard and muscled that he could have pa.s.sed for twenty. Oh, man, he breathed, his only loss of control.

Like a deflowered virgin, I was pinned to the bed, stunned, in pain and bewilderment, face pressed to cool, ironed sheet. Had it been so long that my body had lost its shape, or was he Superman? I had heard about this from older women friends, a trick of nature foisted on the menopausal.

While I lay motionless, he rose and grabbed his shorts. I heard water running in the bathroom. Lunch, I gasped. I'll get lunch. I threw on a loose dress that was hanging on a hook behind the bedroom door, and went into the kitchen to finish the sandwiches. I set a pretty tray with mats and napkins, and brought it out to the small outdoor table off the back porch. "You know I was a journalist," I gushed, in a flood of girlish confidences about my work. I wanted him to know my full story. He didn't volunteer much, and I sensed my resume recitation was an error. I stopped talking in midsentence. Even to my ears, asking him intently about surfing seemed like condescension, but I tried. He answered shortly, indulging the uninitiated.

"How about some mango ice cream?" I asked. "Mango is supposed to have aphrodisiacal powers," I teased. "Although you don't need it." He laughed, his eyes smiling into mine.

CAL VISITED EVERY week or two, or three, never with any regularity or habit, and we coupled in the same animal, often wordless, swiftness. We exchanged the least amount of information or preliminaries. We both knew we had entered into a game, an unstated pact that kept ourselves unknown to each other, as if we realized this was an odd, suspended time and should remain mysterious, almost anonymous. Sometimes it was stand-up s.e.x on the rug before we even got further into the house. Or we would start on the couch with some opening pleasantries, then he would rise as if time was wasting and unb.u.t.ton my shirt. It was usually serious l.u.s.t, although once I rolled off the couch by mistake and laughed so hard it broke the spell. No one noticed any change in me, and given the nature of our limited activities, I would not be introducing him to friends. Yet a shiver ran through me when we arranged an a.s.signation, and I'd spend the day in flushed antic.i.p.ation. I experienced a quickening of senses, a reawakening of the sense of play, forgotten in all my earnest pursuits. I remembered watching a pair of squirrels as they chased each other in the sunlight, sometimes one catching the other, dissolving in a ma.s.s of gray fur as they wrestled together, turning somersaults.

I learned that Cal had built a decent business as a jack-of-all-trades handyman, in constant demand by the condo community. "Oh, work," he shrugged. It was all done for the surfing, his one true obsession that had brought him here from the West Coast twenty-five years ago and kept him doing anything to remain.

Sam the cat retreated outside during our liaisons and stayed away until long after Cal left. At bedtime on those days, I would have to go out in search of her in the starlight. Often it was so dark around my cottage that I did not see her approach, but would feel her weaving around my ankles in greeting until I picked her up and slung her over my shoulders. Those nights she kneaded the quilt and sniffed in disapproval at the smell of a stranger before settling into her habitual roosting spot between my calves. She then turned her back on me, closing her eyes. She liked being the only object of my affections and did not care to share our bed.

Every once in a while, perhaps in some memory of heat, Sam refused to sleep. She paced the floor in the bedroom and yowled, no matter how long I ignored her. In defeat, I would get up. Before I could fully open the front door, she squeezed through the narrow opening with rocket speed and disappeared into the night. Across the road lived a big, gray tomcat that bothered all the females in the neighborhood. One morning Sam slinked home, a golf b.a.l.l.sized swelling on her back. It was infected, probably a fight wound or a love bite, diagnosed my vet, Dr. Nishimoto. He cut the pus out. See what happens when you go out and tangle with boys, I cooed. But it was too late.

Back in my thirties when I was looking for a second husband, I once followed a suggestion in a meditation book: Before you go to sleep, ask your G.o.d for a companion who is compatible in mind, body, and soul.

When I met one, it just about killed me.

The guru had forgotten to mention a fourth ingredient - unmarried.

After that romance ended, I used to lull myself to sleep by remembering our coc.o.o.ned arms. After far too long, I willed myself to forget.

In a traditional narrative, my affair with Cal would be considered as the moment when the heroine Embraces Life. Yet I knew it only const.i.tuted a pleasant diversion, no more, no less, a welcomed shot of life that did me more good than a year of spa treatments. I had known the soul-soaring fecundity of true love but didn't miss the havoc it usually brought. For now at least, the dalliance with Cal made me feel like I had gone to Las Vegas, won the jackpot, and left town before I lost it all.

With amus.e.m.e.nt, I discovered that Isabella Bird had had a fling herself. A larger-than-life, s.e.xy, and entirely inappropriate one. After Hawaii, she sailed for California with born-again exuberance to continue a planned journey throughout the West. No longer the proper Victorian clergyman's daughter, she had unleashed a new Isabella, free to kick up her heels. She described herself as a reckless lady "with the up-to-anything and free-legged air."

In Colorado she hired a guide, a cultured English gentleman turned frontiersman known throughout the region as Mountain Jim. A surviving photo of Jim shows a middle-aged, handsome man with shoulder-length golden curls and a swashbuckling air; he wore a patch to cover an eye lost in a bear fight. He lived a ruinous life devoted to whiskey and rowdiness.

Isabella and Mountain Jim set off alone together to conquer the 14,259-foot Longs Peak. Snow, frozen temperatures, and alt.i.tude sickness nearly turned them back, until Jim tied a rope around Isabella's waist, pulling and dragging her to the top. Fascinated by his erudite conversation and desperado looks, she felt inflamed with attraction for him, fanned no doubt by the melodramatic mountain landscape.

But once back in her Estes Park cabin, she announced that she needed to see more of the Colorado Territory and fled for several weeks. On her return, Jim declared his love. Unfortunately, he also unburdened himself with a lengthy, alarming confession of the depths to which he had descended.

Although they were an improbable match, Jim stirred Isabella in every sense, probably for the only time in her life. In a letter to her sister, Henrietta, she confessed in pre-Freudian innocence that she dreamed that he had fired his gun at her!

"There's a man I could have married," she wrote to Hennie, although adding that he was a man "no sane woman would marry."

She and Mountain Jim parted tearfully. A year later, back in England, she received word that he was dead, shot in the head by an acquaintance.

I STILL HADN'T COMPLETELY shrugged off my 1950s imprinting that decreed the traditional family as ideal. I wasn't the first woman to be deeply torn between social convention and desire for independence. But that these doubts still lingered at middle age, surprised and even embarra.s.sed me.

Why was there no steady man in my life? I could not readily explain. Various answers to The Question had occurred to me.

Perhaps a deep-seated lack of self-esteem controls my choices, sabotaging the chance for love. I don't try hard enough. When I could be squeezing into a sensational dress, whipping myself into an enthusiastic countenance to go out and scintillate prospects, I often prefer to stay home with a book. I am too introverted. Maybe too extroverted. Too bossy. Too strident, too opinionated, too confident. Too cranky. Way, way too picky. Perhaps the wounds and scars from previous tries left me hiding in a sh.e.l.l of self-protective defenses. Or had I been too lucky in love, experiencing it so profoundly that I couldn't accept less? I had adapted to a solitary state that kept me at a middle distance from others, close but not too close, guarding my privacy and requiring fewer compromises. Fate and destiny set me on a different path.

All of the above.

None of the above.

Who cares? Single life is vastly underrated.

The decade of my thirties had been fruitlessly spent searching for a second husband to father children, and it was clearly the most miserable of my life. I used to wake in the morning in a panic, as an emptiness stretched ahead. Somehow, somewhere, that feeling disappeared - poof! Now I felt that I should get down on my knees and thank the lord that I had not married any of those husband candidates. I endorsed an old proverb: It takes a mighty fine husband to be better than no husband at all. Some women secretly choose not to marry, unable to disclose the choice even to themselves. Once released from the hungry need for a partner, I found myself relieved. Without really knowing it I entered another realm, with few guides or signposts. The world of living alone and liking it.

How did I envision old age? There weren't lots of models for us single girls. Some women took themselves out of the game, wore dowdy clothes, let their bodies go soft, and retreated into a sort of virgin status. Others engaged in serial affairs, or looked for rescue by Prince Charming as they approached sixty, feeling their lives still incomplete. I knew only a few women who got it right: those who had men in their lives, or not, had love affairs, or not, and went on with the business of living.

PART FOUR.

Living Well Is the Best Revenge.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

The Pansy Craze.