Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 2

  “If you won’t even own up to the possible ways that the disease might have entered your body,” he’d told Mélisande as she sat across a desk from him, her eyelids fluttering between open and closed as she gazed past him at a back wall full of framed diplomas, “how can you hope to treat this disease aggressively?”

  Once the doctor provided us with a month’s worth of pills from his own private stash—at two American dollars a pill—Mélisande was a lot more compliant than any of us expected. I had told her to come and find me every morning so I could watch her take the pill as we ate breakfast together and she had done it for over two weeks now. Most of the time we ate something quickly on the patio outside my room. Other times we ate in the hotel dining room, with my son at our side. Mélisande was gaining weight, my old clothes fitting her a little better. She cried less and less too at breakfast, in part I think because she knew the staff was watching us. But what she never did again was touch my son, who reached his tubby little arms out to her, contorting his face into a grimace that would turn into wails, then tears, when she would simply ignore him or turn away.

  I stopped bringing my son to breakfast with her after a while. It was too much for both of them. By the time Mélisande had to return to the doctor for another month’s supply, I cancelled the breakfasts altogether and passed on the job of monitoring her compliance to her mother, who from the day she learned that Mélisande was sick never stopped calling her a bouzen, a whore, even as she stopped whatever she was doing every morning to make sure that her oldest child swallowed the pill and chased it down with at least a piece of bread. Some mornings I would watch this exchange between them from the side of the pool, where I took a daily swim with my son, or from the hibiscus garden where we sometimes played. The mother was no taller than Mélisande herself, but was a strapping, muscular woman. I could almost see the veins popping out from the rolls on her dark neck as she continuously berated Mélisande, who’d try to put an end to their transaction by swallowing the pill quickly and rushing off.

  “What are you going to do when Monsieur and Madame stop paying for your two-dollar pills?” the mother was shouting like a drill sergeant hazing a recruit. Her fear was palpable. Her daughter’s survival now completely depended on Roland and me. If we suddenly decided to sell the hotel and move elsewhere, her child could die. What if the drug companies, who provided the doctor with the free supply that he unethically resold to us, suddenly stopped making the drug or no longer sent it to Haiti? What if that doctor took off as well? Suddenly in the chain that ran from the creation of the drug to our ability to afford it, if any part of it broke down, she could lose her daughter.

  One morning, I heard her asking Mélisande as Mélisande was taking the pill, what if the white man starts keeping all of the pills for himself? What if Monsieur and Madame are killed in a horrible car accident?

  “You will never have a healthy child,” she told her another day. “You will never have a husband.”

  “You should talk to her,” Roland said to me one morning after overhearing this too. “All illness involves state of mind as well as state of body. It can’t be helpful for the poor girl to be treated that way.”

  I felt like a coward for not interfering sooner.

  “Where do you want to be buried?” the mother said soon after. “You better start saving now if you want a fancy coffin.”

  In the Haiti of my time and place, death was always around some corner. In car accidents. Disease. Kidnappings. Unlike the rest of us, Mélisande’s mother could not afford the conditional optimism this tiny little pill allowed. I could easily imagine myself in the mother’s place. I’d probably have many of the same concerns and fears.

  That morning, after Mélisande had gone off to breakfast, I asked to have a word with her mother, who, as soon as I closed my husband’s office door behind us, began to cry.

  “Mèsi, mèsi,” she sobbed, grabbing my hand. “Thank you for not throwing her out. Thank you for not letting her die.”

  “There are millions of people all over the world being kept alive in this way,” I said, gently tugging my hands out of her grasp. “Besides, you’re wasting precious time with your daughter, time that you could be spending with her just as you had before. You can help her the most by not cursing but loving her.”

  “Love her?” She frowned and her eyebrows nearly became one.

  “Yes, love her,” I said. “This is a precise concrete act that calls for more effort than you think you possess, but you must love her.”

  I knew what she was thinking. These silly half-assed outsiders, these diasporas with their mushy thinking, why does it all come back to love with them? Love the world. Love life. Love yourself. Love your children. Don’t yell at them. Don’t hit them. Don’t give them away. Don’t these diasporas know that there are many other ways to show love than to be constantly talking about it?

  “Of course I love her,” she said, spreading both her arms wide as if to prove it. “That’s why I am so tough on her.”

  Now sitting on a cushioned bench near the office door, she looked unconvinced, but also ashamed, ashamed that I, on top of everything, now had reason to scold her, ashamed that she had no choice but to sit there and take it.

  I too felt ashamed for having made her feel that way. Pressing both her hands down on her knees as if she’d suddenly realized how much they protruded from her body, of the things I’d said, what she responded to was what I did not say.

  “I saw you,” she said, “I saw you the day your mother drowned herself.”

  I moved from behind the desk and closer to her. Both our faces were soaked now the way Mélisande’s had been the day she’d made her announcement to me. Sitting across from her, our protruding knees nearly touching, I said, “You did?”

  “Wi,” she said, “I was in the kitchen cooking when I heard your scream. I rushed out and saw her floating facedown in the pool. It was awful of her to come all the way from Miami to kill herself in your new husband’s pool.”

  I’m still not sure, I wanted to tell her, that this was what happened. My mother had never been a good swimmer, neither in Miami nor Léogâne. She had only gone near streams and oceans and pools when my father was with her. When he died, she had no one to protect her near water.

  “I saw you with her body in your arms,” she continued, her eyes fixed rather than on my face or eyes but on her own worn-out sandals, on her own feet, on the floor. “When I heard you scream I thought the sky would open up and it would start to rain because I thought even God would have no choice but to cry with you.”

  It did rain that evening, I reminded her, a torrential rain that caused mudslides that pulled dozens of houses from the hillside shanty-towns into trash-strewn ravines all over the capital. God had shown, I reminded her, that his tears only brought further losses. Still I hadn’t been able to feel sad for the others. I felt no solidarity with the mudslide victims, the mothers and fathers and babies whose bodies were engorged by the red earth like my mother’s had been by the meticulously maintained pool water. Why should I be the only one grieving, I had thought. Why should my mother be the only one to die? I had not felt bad for even one other person’s loss since, I realized. Until I’d learned about her daughter. I didn’t want Mélisande to die, I told her. I didn’t want her to cry to the heavens for her daughter the way I had for my mother. I didn’t want the sky to open and carry others away.

  I knew that even after our talk there would be no mawkish mother and daughter embrace between her and Mélisande. There would be no apologies.

  The next morning, I watched from my patio where my son was bobbing up and down on a playpen next to me and saw her silently hand Mélisande a glass of water.

  “Whatever did you tell her?” Roland asked as we had breakfast at the same table that Mélisande and I had occupied for a few weeks.

  “You know … ,” I said, which he knew meant that I didn’t want to talk about it.

  At the end of the month, just when Mélisan
de needed another refill of the drugs, her doctor mysteriously left Haiti and moved back to Montreal. As Mélisande’s supply dwindled to nearly nothing, Roland called everyone he knew but couldn’t track the doctor down. Mélisande had no choice but to start seeing another doctor, a Haitian female one this time, who ordered a new series of tests, dredging up the distressing diagnosis, the counting of T cells, which I could tell, when Mélisande came back with now several bottles of pills, had taken away whatever illusion she might have harbored that she was getting well. The new regimen did not agree with her. She had stomachaches, diarrhea, and nausea, and began spending her days in bed. It would take time for her body to get used to the new drugs, the new doctor said. Roland made a few more calls and we found Mélisande yet another doctor to confirm that she was indeed getting the right treatment.

  She wanted the one-pill treatment back, Mélisande told the third doctor as he examined her on the small cot in the bedroom of one of the hotel’s workers’ bungalows, a small wallpapered room that she shared with her mother. Fishing out one of the old prescription bottles from one of my old purses, she handed it to the doctor, a tall Cuban man who spoke Creole with only a slight Spanish accent.

  “Ay!” the Cuban said when he noticed the Canadian doctor’s name.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked from where I was standing by the door.

  It turned out, the Cuban explained, that what Mélisande had first gotten was a placebo. It was more or less an aspirin. It had not been doing anything for her at all. The doctor who had prescribed and sold the first pills to us had suddenly fled Haiti because he’d been discovered selling those useless pills to unsuspecting patients all over town.

  “Your treatment really begins now,” the Cuban told Mélisande as her tiny body sank deeper under the thin cotton sheets on the bed.

  “You must be vigilant about it,” he added.

  I saw Mélisande’s eyes sink along with her body. She had lost precious time, the Cuban was telling her. The disease, which was already advanced in her, had probably progressed further.

  “She could have actually died,” he told me as I walked out of Mélisande’s room. She turned her face away from us, burying it in her pillow while I pulled the door behind me.

  What would it have cost me to have actually trusted less? This was what I would have done for my son. I would have questioned, made deals, insisted, yelled.

  “We’ve gone way beyond the call of duty,” Roland said when I met him for lunch under a sun umbrella by the pool.

  “How? By getting her a quack?”

  “We tried to give her a chance,” he said. “We tried to do everything we could have done for our own child.”

  Our own child could have left the country. If a quack had intentionally fed our child a placebo instead of treating her, Roland himself would have hired the hit man.

  That afternoon, Mélisande’s mother served us a late lunch on one of the terraces while our son napped. She was sweating in her tight gray cotton uniform and dirty white cooking apron. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf and though this was something she wore every day, it looked like mourning garb.

  “We’re sorry,” Roland told her. “But she was probably sick before she came to work with us. Maybe someone was with her when she was young, touched her, abused her.”

  The horrible possibilities were endless.

  She laid the food down quickly—grilled lobster and rice with pigeon peas—turned her back to us without saying anything, and walked away. In her mind, we were possibly just as bad as the quack. Had we not fed Mélisande the hope of that pill, perhaps she might have taken her home to a bòkò or a leaf doctor, someone who might have really tried to help her. If intention counted, her people might have better intentions than ours. They might have really wanted her cured.

  Perhaps I should apologize to her too, I thought. Tell her that we tried, were doing the best we could.

  I got up from my seat and tried to follow her, but Roland grabbed my hand and pulled me down again.

  “Leave it alone,” he said, sounding now truly angry, but not at me or at her, but rather for us, for her.

  After lunch, I went back to the bungalow to see Mélisande again. She was lying in bed in a deep, sound sleep and had not even stirred when I walked in the room. Her thin body, now stripped of both the thin sheet and the nightgown she’d been wearing, naked except for a matching set of polka-dotted bra and panties, would eventually adjust to the new cocktail, the Cuban doctor had told me. And slowly she would once again rejoin our lives at the hotel.

  Watching her sleep so quietly, without even the hint of a snore, I thought what will she possessed. Her symptoms had completely disappeared while she was taking that ineffectual pill. It had seemed to help her once she’d believed it could.

  There was something different about her face now, though. She no longer seemed young. Perhaps it was because of her sudden weight gains and losses, but she now appeared to have wrinkles, some between her eyebrows, some around her mouth, a few under her eyes.

  A few days later, her body did finally adjust to the cocktail and Mélisande got out of bed again. I noticed her one morning sitting by the pool staring into the water, then up at the sky while my son and I ate breakfast on my patio. She reached into her pocket and pulled out something that she traced against the lifelines in her palm, then made a fist around it before placing it in her pocket again. She did this a couple of times, pulled the thing out of her pocket, then looked down at it, then put it back. At some point, I noticed it was something shiny, a small ring, with some kind of stone that, though minute, was catching the light more than the rest of the ring.

  I took my son and walked down to the pool to go see her. She was startled to see us. Her eyes had been closed and I had to call out her name to let her know we were there.

  “How are you?” I asked, while Gabriel and I slid into the lounge chair next to hers.

  Sitting there, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, so lost after my father died. They’d married when she was nineteen and, aside from me, he had been, whatever that meant now, her whole life. When I finished school, and retraced my steps back to our beginning, to Haiti, she had dutifully followed, then at the first opportunity had killed herself. Her death had been the last in a series of goodbyes. In many ways, she and I had been like Mélisande and her mother, without the friction, without the harsh words, without any words at all. For so long, before she died, we had already been separated by water.

  My son reached out for her, but she pulled her hand away from him and shoved it back into her pocket.

  “What’s that you have there?” I asked.

  She must have been wondering how long I had been looking at her, watching her pull this thing in and out of her pocket. Slowly she reached in deeper into her pocket and out came the tiny ring once more. The gold was as thin as a rope of angel hair pasta, but it had, just as I’d suspected, a small glass stone that was still capturing most of the light.

  Drawn by the glint of the stone, my son reached for the ring, but Mélisande yanked her hand away once more to protect it.

  “Did one of the guests leave that behind?” I asked her.

  She shook her head no.

  “Did someone give it to you? A man?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he give it to you before you were sick?”

  Another nod.

  “Do you think this is the person who made you sick?”

  “Maybe,” she answered softly, two lines of tears running down her face.

  “He said he was going to marry you?”

  He did, then he left and never came back.

  The ring was worthless, of course, one of the krizokal, hollowed fake gold ones made by the corner jeweler down the street. I had seen a bunch of them on the hands of young girls who came to the hotel for drinks and sexual exploits with many of the foreign male guests. That type of ring even had a name. It was called the Port-au-Prince marriage special.

  “Mél
isande,” I began, trying to think of the best way to tell her something everyone already knew. That ring was like the pills she’d been taking at first. There was no romance or magic in it.

  “Mwen konnen,” she said. “I know,” signaling with a wave of one bony ringless hand that she no longer wanted to talk about it.

  On Not Growing Up

  Ben Marcus

  —HOW LONG HAVE YOU been a child?

  —Seventy-one years.

  —Who did you work with?

  —Meyerowitz for the first phase: colic, teething, walking, talking. He taught me how to produce false prodigy markers and developmental reversals, to test the power in the room without speaking. I was encouraged to look beyond the tantrum and drastic mood migrations that depended on the environment, and if you know my work you have an idea what resulted. The rest is a hodgepodge, but I don’t advocate linear apprenticeships. A stint in the Bonn Residency. Fellowships at the Cleveland Place, then later a stage at Quebec Center. I entered that Appalachian Trail retreat in 1974, before Krenov revised it, but had to get helicoptered out. Probably my first infant crisis, before I knew to deliberately court interference. The debt to Meyerowitz is huge, obviously, if just for the innocence training. Probably I should have laid off after that, because now it’s all about unlearning.

  —Unlearning as Kugler practices it? That radical?

  —I skip the hostility to animals. I skip the forced submersion and the chelation flush. That’s proven to be a dead end. But Kugler is a walking contradiction in that respect, isn’t he? He keeps a horse barn. He does twilight childishness, and now he’s suddenly opposing the Phoenix baby-talk crowd, who I think are not as threatening as he makes out.

  —They’re not registered.

  —True, but they’re pro-family, and I still believe, when I’m out in the field, in a pro-parent regimen, in supporting those with maturity fixations.

  —Which is admittedly contradictory, isn’t it, given how many adult families you’ve worked with, and how many of them have ultimately disbanded?