Kaminski on Retreat
The
little birds, finches of some sort, came the closest, hopping along the sea
wall to examine the pieces of bread Kaminski had set out. The gulls were
prouder, not as efficient at close work, preferring to make watchful circles,
dip down and catch the bread in the air. At the end of the promenade a troop of
schoolchildren marched along the path through the palms, some running ahead and
shattering the stillness with their cries and hand-clapping games.
Kaminski retreated
under the veranda with his beer, leaving the rest of the chicken sandwich on
the stonewall for the little birds.
From under the veranda the deep blue of the ocean was comfortingly more distant, less
immediately impinging on Kaminski’s feeble reserves of morale. The rest
of the bar was empty, it being the off-season in the island resort of St.
Barnabas. He drank the rest of the
beer from the glass with the air of a man determined to cadge any use from
bitterness, put the glass down and pushed the chair back in order to rise. He
hated the sound the metal legs made scraping across the tiles and determined to
remember never to push the chair back again while still weighting it down with
his corpulent frame. The voices in the kitchen ceased, and Kaminski could feel
the pairs of eyes on him, watching his every move for cues as to the service he
required. It was disconcerting to
be the hidden focus of
attention when all he wanted was to slide away into tropical
anomie. It was a little morbid, a
little precious to have such preoccupations he knew, watching him with the
habits of observation of a lifetime trained on a favorite subject.
His wife would
have liked it here. The remnants of British rule would have amused her, the
well-groomed hotel staff with the air of resentment bubbling away under the
surface of their black faces, just like parts of England.
"Mesta Boodle
J. Kaminski. Telephone for Mistah Bodley J. Kaminski."
Kaminski was
purposefully stroking his beard, wandering in the lobby reading the historic
maps and charts of the Antilles above the furniture, when he was thus paged. On
the first morning in the hotel he had paused outside the doors by the
oversized Grecian urns full of flowers where he’d overheard
the Northern English hotel manager exhorting the desk clerk, "For
God’s sake, don’t leave out the J, man. He's a best-selling author."
And the poor man
had taken the admonishment to heart ever since.
"I'll take it
in my room," said Kaminski.
"Yes, suh,
Mistah J," said the desk clerk.
It would be Gerald
Cate, his agent, the only other person who knew where he was. He had purposely
left the Blackberry in New York, but found him in the elevator looking forward
to Gerald’s impertinent, sneaking requests, whatever they might be. In the
room, he dallied by the balcony, overlooking fishermen in the bay pulling up
their long dugouts on the sandy beach.
"Hello,
yes?" said Kaminski, picking up the phone. He could hear Gerald’s voice
crackling over the long-distance line, speaking to someone else.
"Hello?"
"Yes?" Gerald was unaware he was on the
line. Just like him to be so
distracted.
"Bodley? Oh, hello. I didn't know you were on.
How are you, Bodley?"
"I’m fine,”
said Kaminski, hoping Gerald would hear the utter indifference in his voice.
"Bodley, I’ve
got something here we think should interest you."
"Oh,
no."
"Well, I know
you'd like to see the sales figures improve, Bodley. I'm sorry about your wife, by the way. I just heard the
other day. I had no idea. We're all very sorry."
"Yeah,
well."
"Bodley, The
Chakra Report is languishing, just languishing. It would be a shame to let it
just drop. After all the work you put in, we think it deserves a good shot.
We've got to appeal to the broadest possible audience, Bodley."
"What is it,
for God's sake?"
"Okay, okay.
I'm just glancing through the brochure.
Bear with me."
They were getting
sillier and sillier ideas. He didn’t know who was worse, Gerald or Lucretia
Margarethe over at Illicit Press. Next they would have him dressing up in a
Bozo suit and doing belly flops at conventions. As if there was something sacred about the sales
figures. Kaminski didn’t like to
think his books were token offerings to destiny designed to improve his
standing in the here-after, so of course he was prepared to do what was required,
just that it was so humiliating sometimes to have to actually perform.
"Okay. Ann Stevens sent me this and asked if
you might be interested in doing a book signing. It’s a convention in Minneapolis, New Age sort of thing.
They'd have some sort of stall."
Kaminski groaned
into the mouthpiece.
"Gerald, I
mean, how could you."
"Bodley, you
don't have to go if you don't want to. It just happens that Minneapolis is a
good place for your sort of books. The convention is the Third Annual North
American Cosmobiological Conference.
Apparently they'll all be there, Uri Geller, Madame Bovary, you name it.
Just a joke. Lighten up, Bodley."
"Give me a
few days, Gerald."
"Of
course."
Kaminski lay on
the bed, face towards the ceiling, listening to the chatter of the hotel maids
as they worked their way down the hall with towels and sheets. He had not been
this lonely in fourteen years. Sandra, if there was a heaven as conceived by
the Episcopal church, with trim, green lawns and squash courts,
would be engaged in joining the most interesting organizations, reforming the trickier, more Oriental
customs that led to poor posture among the angels. She would have recommended
activity, sea breezes, long walks, up on the balls of your toes, Bodley.
They’d hiked in
Nepal the year before, and she'd been in fine health. It was the poor timing of
her death that shook Kaminski. They had no children and had looked forward so
much to spending the next few years traveling the world together now that his
writing was getting him somewhere. Kaminski found he no longer wanted to keep
up with interests they'd shared in common. He'd stopped doing the TM he'd been
practicing for years. His stomach grumbled, and he regretted having left the
rest of his chicken sandwich downstairs for the birds. He rose and checked his
appearance in the bathroom. The sallow skin and bags under the eyes aroused
deep-seated feelings of
regret. Maybe the lights were to blame. He should at least try to get
some sun, he thought. He started out again for the beach, this time determined
to actually set foot on the sand.
Kaminski the conqueror.
Away, timidity. In with the new Kaminski, the positive thinking man for all seasons. Sandra would
not have minded if he kept his eyes open for eligible female companionship. It was just the thing to vanquish the blues.
The sunglasses
went on in the lobby and Kaminski perused the bulletin board, smiling
ironically at the thought of limbo dancing entertainment during the night’s
buffet provided by the Carries Carnival Society Dancers. But first he would
take the cruise into Camries in the afternoon aboard the Jolly Roger. A family
of what looked like Canadians was checking in at the desk. The husband
consulted his diving watch and adjusted one of the bands. Perhaps he was
decompressing, thought Kaminski
cruelly. The wife was a
thin, little woman with a startled expression, and her adolescent daughter happily exchanged appraising glances with the male hotel staff
loitering between duties.
The beach was
mostly empty of people except for the gathering of Rastafarian vendors under
the first palm trees. They had given up approaching Kaminski. He was not
interested in buying crafts or marijuana. They no longer paid any attention to
him, laughing and gossiping among themselves in low, rasping voices as he took
off his loafers and trudged across the sand to the plastic recliners set under
frond-thatched shelters. Kaminski
sat under the palm fronds and stared out at the wavelets hitting on the shore,
heaving deep sighs occasionally when his stomach grumbled. He thought of Sandra in Nepal against a backdrop of
snow-covered mountains and the apartment on Columbus Avenue she had loved. He
was thinking of selling it and moving out of New York. The city only depressed him now where
before he’d taken pride in the rugged adaptability it required of its inhabitants.
Restless, Kaminski
decided to check the time the cruise was sailing to Camries to make sure he
would not miss the boat. He walked
back to the hotel across the beach. The Canadian family was out on the veranda
with some soft drinks, looking out at the ocean with beatific looks on their faces. The weather was beautiful, every day a
perfection of blazing sun and blue sky. But Kaminski had discovered he became
nauseous if exposed to the sun for too long.
He checked the
bulletin board. There was just enough time to go back to the room for a fresh
shirt. He debated whether or not to bring a book along. He was rereading The
Grapes Of Wrath, but decided against it when recalling the episode on the
flight down. The man
next to him, a lawyer involved in some industrial dispute, had told a story
about Steinbeck's widow in Japan asking at a bookstore for one of her husband’s
books. The man had thought it
hilarious that the Japanese had called the book The Angry Raisins. It was
pretty funny, but the trouble was he found the good-natured Joad family also
made him nauseous. Kaminski was
heartsick with loss. The goodness
of common people was
something he no longer put any faith in.
He kept hoping Tom Joad would reveal an incestuous longing for
Rosasharon, which was no way to reread Steinbeck.
The jetty which
served the village of Chastened was a short walk and around a minor headland
down the beach. Village girls swam near the jetty with all their clothes on. In
a clearing, fishermen repaired nets draped over their dugouts. The Jolly Roger
was moored off the end of the jetty, rising up and down in the swells. A crowd
of people stood by the gangplank.
Kaminski inquired whether he could go straight on.
"Jus
go on her, mon," said someone amid a flurry of competing responses.
Kaminski proceeded
up the gangplank unsteadily. He stopped once on deck, adjusting to the
sensation of being water-borne, and then continued sensibly clutching the
handrail. He stood against the
handrail in the stern as the boat began to fill with people.
There was much jostling and socializing. Many people seemed drunk. Kaminski began to wish he'd stayed
on shore. He was the only white person on the boat and felt he stood out like a
sore thumb. The sight of a little girl heaving over-board while her mother held
her, afterwards wiping the debris from the front of her dress, put Kaminski on
the verge of losing his lunch himself.
The coastline
unfolded, the rock face of ocean-battered land, green forest cover inland of
the sugar cane plantations. The fishermen in the dugouts waved as the Jolly
Roger passed, rocking their small craft in its wake. A man in a dashiki clutching a bottle of rum
yelled at someone he knew in a boat. Kaminski envied his easy smile. He turned
and looked past Kaminski as if he were not there, chuckling. Kaminski smiled
and looked out at the boat as if he shared in the knowledge of the fisherman’s
picaresque ways.
The boat made its
way into the harbor of Camries, a town with white-walled houses and
bougainvillea in bursts of violet and pale yellow on its hillsides. A banana
boat was moored at the dockside, and thin, disfigured men walked idly back and
forth in the shadow of
its hull. Kaminski prepared to disembark along with the other passengers. Two
young black women in tight pants moved ahead of him down the gangplank. Kaminski
thought to stop them, invite them somewhere for a drink and a chat, but of
course he did not. Instead he
wandered the dockside, amid the coarse-featured countrywomen sitting in front of their taros,
yams, melons and fruits, fishmongers and the daily catch of parrotfish, long
blue kingfish and pink squid.
Kaminski moved
through it all unperturbed, solemn, unmoved and oddly unscathed. He would have bought something just for
the human contact, but Sandra's illness had been expensive and The Chakra Report
was not selling well and he did not feel like sailing back clutching a
sack-full of breadfruit. He walked into a bar and sat on a stool drinking a
beer, hoping in this way to find the inspiration in the flow, the improvised
communion of life. But Sandra's absence had stung his heart. He could feel his body failing in its
functions, and he feared his gas would offend the two other men in the
bar. In the end, he nursed three
or four beers until it was time for the Jolly Roger to make the return voyage. Kaminski
motioned that he wanted to pay. The bartender paused in his work and moved down
the bar to take his money. The two men in the corner of the bar continued to
mumble in a thick-tongued drunken patois.
Kaminski said
goodbye. The bartender
looked up, as if shocked to hear a human voice addressing him.
The boat was
preparing to leave when Kaminski walked up the jetty. There were more people on
board now, but the two girls in tight pants were nowhere to be seen. He stood
along the rail again. The salt
spray stung his eyes. People kept bumping into him. The journey seemed twice as long as before.
Kaminski finally gave up trying to move out of people’s ways, scowling at
everyone, whereupon he felt the others accepted him as some sort of mildly
amusing crank.
Back at the hotel,
the desk clerk was busy trying to please the Canadians, all three of them, who
had a problem with their lodgings. Kaminski felt better. He had come to St.
Barnabas to get away from life but found instead he was in a place with
complaining Canadians and feeling oddly the better for it.
After a shower, he
sat out on the balcony reading The Grapes of Wrath. He flicked to the end, to
the scene where Rosasharon breastfeeds the starving, old man. Kaminski had
tried writing a book, his first attempt at a novel, called The Country of Desire, about a family of
Puerto Rican immigrants in Newark, New Jersey. He had researched it for three years and written it in two,
but that was before he'd met Sandra.
A few Rastafarians
were down in the sand practicing their yoga. The sun was sinking and the hotel
staff was preparing the buffet out on the veranda. The little birds, finches of
some sort, hopped along the sea wall, looking for scraps of food. Kaminski found he was hungry.
Hungry and lonely. Minneapolis
suddenly made sense. He checked
the time. Gerald usually worked
late. Kaminski went inside, sat on the bed and picked up the telephone.
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