Indecision: A Novel Page 16

  “Yes? If, if, if—then what?”

  Fervently I clasped Brigid’s hand. My touch may have been ambiguous—“Quoi?” she said—with all the ambiguity of the future, but there was also the sureness in it of believing the future can be met head-on and converted into past time without too many leftover regrets. I figured, and tried to transmit this figuring to her through my palm, that whatever we turned out mutually wanting would be just the right thing, to which this touch would end up having made a good prelude. Meanwhile decide things, I told myself, but only the ones you can, and using honest developing feeling as your sole single principle, decisively divide the objects of decision from the objects of a sure and careful patience. So just go from moment to moment like someone picking his way from rock to rock across a stream.

  “Ah, Bridge.” I was filled with gratitude toward the revolutionary pharmaceutical giants of our age. And even Pfizer, for firing me! Because in any other period of human history what could have been done with me, with my condition? I squeezed Brigid’s hand.

  “I care for you as well,” she said, weakly squeezing back. “Mais tu es complètement fou. Un fou. Do you know what I am saying? You are fully crazy, really.”

  “I was crazy,” I acknowledged.

  SEVENTEEN

  Edwin looked at us, chuckled, and said that he was going to give another shot to constructing a palm-leaf structure. I hoped this announcement might indicate so much sexual tension bristling between Brigid and me that Edwin (with the special psychobiological acuity of a premodern man) sensed the intensity of our need to be left to our own devices.

  However when we retired to our hut Brigid seemed in no mood.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as she established herself on her hammock in a definitely noli me tangere sort of way. “I forgot about Edwin. We’ll split the money three ways. I should have thought of that before. Think of the wedding the guy could have.”

  “You happen to chance upon the bobohuariza and now you want to take it away and then maybe take out a patent? I am sorry, but no, you cannot do this.” She’d taken off her boots and slipped beneath her net. “It would be the history of South America repeated all over again.” She shook her head and her headlamp made the gesture especially dramatic. “It would be just as with the rubber tree—”

  “What? What’s the problem?” And did rubber really grow on trees?

  She’d shut her headlamp off—now it was utter, utter jungle dark—and was asking me whether I knew the rubber tree also came from the Amazon.

  “Everything comes from somewhere,” I said, slinging my ass onto my own hammock and beginning to pull off my Wellington boots while Brigid explained that in 1870 some English dude had smuggled a few rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil, with the result that before you knew it rubber plantations had sprung up in British Malaya. “So that by the middle of the twentieth century Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, home to the rubber tree, now they are mostly purchasing all their rubbers from abroad.”

  Stupidly I laughed.

  “Yes, so ironic and cruel that it is quite funny—to take away the wealth of the place and then sell it back at a high cost. But it will be the same black comedy if you take the bobohuariza and sell it as hair remover to the rich blanco ladies of Quito and Lima and New York.”

  For a moment I just sat there on my hammock listening to the jungle.

  “Well how about if we share the profits then?” I suggested. “With the Ecuadorians?” No response—and it seemed like the jungle got louder the longer you listened, like some huge insect riot where their demands went increasingly unmet. The sound had begun to fringe the edges of my good mood and freak me out a little. I had to say something: “So what’s up with the Ecuadorians anyway? I mean, where’s the initiative of these people if they have to wait around for someone like me to show up before anyone even thinks of becoming the local bobohuariza tycoon?”

  “An interesting mystery. But also it is very interesting about you, that you come from New England.”

  “How do you say non sequitur in French? It’s not interesting at all.”

  “Don’t you think so? Because New England is very rich and that’s where America first began, yes?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “And there in New England with your wealth you also have freedom, relatively speaking, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And yet in South America as you notice the people are quite poor and lack genuine freedom with their economies, and have not a lot of cosmetics companies?”

  “Sure.” But she was making me feel like one of those dumb-assed yes-men in Plato’s dialogues who just keep on going Yes, Socrates, right Socrates until they’ve been led unwarily by their own dull answers into serious extremities of contradiction.

  “And why do you think the cosmetics companies are there and not here?”

  “You know Brigid you can seem pretty didactic sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes? For me an advance.”

  I lay slung in the hammock listening to the surround-sound eruption of humid white noise. “Oh, go ahead,” I said. At least she had a nice voice.

  And now she was saying that it was kind of strange on the face of it that New England and then all the US would get to be so rich while South America remained so basically poor, something that seemed very natural to me—or at least it did until Brigid pointed out that South America had always been loaded with natural resources, whereas New England was pretty singularly impoverished in those terms.

  “All right.” But the darkness of the hut, tucked inside the massive spinning night, was making me feel a little disoriented and uncertain.

  “Maybe this arrangement of wealth doesn’t seem very strange to us, but—” And here she reached back into history and referenced the incredible mineral wealth of South America circa its conquest, the super-fertile coastal soils, and then the fact (which I’d never believed before or believed the opposite of—had simply just never considered) that South America had also had this comparatively large, concentrated, and therefore readily-enslaved Indian population. “In New England by contrast you had nothing for Europe to want—no silver, no gold. And your climate was very like England’s, while here and of course in the Caribbean one could cultivate sugar, cotton, coffee, tobacco, indigo. And what is the result of this, I think?”

  “Oh you don’t even think it, you just know.”

  “Bof—okay. Well I know or I believe that for the mother countries, it was therefore possible to let go of New England, let go of North America. Because you were redundant, you can see?” And now in the super-dark cabana Brigid pitched or spun the argument that America had been able to win real as well as notional independence from the old European metropolis, and ultimately escape the neocolonial predicament of things down here, because its early industries were identical rather than complementary to Europe’s. So New England had established its own manufactories and created and relied on local markets and thus eventually built up some real economic independence consisting of powerful producers and strong consumers, a project that had also been attempted in Ecuador and elsewhere after the Second World War, and abandoned since the debt crisis of the eighties. “It’s depressing for South America to be still the same as always—raw materials, cheap labor.”

  “That is depressing,” I said, feeling somewhat glum myself, like the Abulinix might not work after all. And yet I found it was really doing something to me to imagine the original American Wilmerdings happening onto the meagerness of New England nature as in fact a piece of luck. To think of anything is just a step away from imagining it otherwise, and now that I thought of my particular American family, and the portion of lucky accident that seemed to have fallen onto our lives to get mistaken for grace, I became a little unreal to myself. Their luck had become my luck, and what did I do with my luck? It seemed like I just sat in it, waiting for more.

  “Brigid?” I said.

  “Yes? What?” The pouting semi-impudent way she said this, like some bored
girl unhappy at being indoors, reminded me suddenly of Alice. I’d been about to congratulate or else console Brigid for all the things she knew, but now I found I was thinking about Alice, so similarly lucky to me, yet more favored by nature in the brains department. Alice must have been thinking along essentially Brigid-esque lines for years, but it wasn’t clear whether this had done her much good. Her sad or grim politics got more and more sophisticated with every rung of education, until finally they landed her a sweet job complete with health insurance—but they also seemed to have exacted a serious revenge against her, according to which she considered all the good things about her, from the straight teeth and stocked brains all the way down to the long legs in the fancy knee-high boots, to be just some side effects of class or whatever. And this seemed not unrelated to her reluctance to go to nice restaurants, or ever have a boyfriend, or even a girlfriend. Or really even to be very happy at all.

  “You know, Brigid,” I found myself saying, “you’re a kind of impersonal person, you know that? You’re like a brain on wheels. Which I’m not saying is bad—but I wonder if it ever gets in the way of some of the more personal relationships you might like to have.”

  I could hear the vicious smile in her voice: “Maybe I am simply not like the personal people which you are so happy to know in New York that when you are lonely and at a loose end you come here to Natasha—about whom you know nothing. Instead you find me. I am sorry.”

  “Hey . . .” I dangled one arm outside my netting, in case a physical rapprochement might be made and some more hand-holding be enjoyed.

  “I am sorry if you don’t enjoy me as much as your tree. But who are you, that you find a strange tree in the Amazon and you act as if this is your invention? You behave as if you are Adam and it was planted there especially for you.”

  “You’re talking Adam from the Bible.”

  “Evidently not the tree of knowledge that you have smeared yourself with.”

  “Um, hello? The tree of knowledge is the one you’re supposed to avoid? If you read past the first five pages—”

  “I don’t want to discuss theology with you. I could show you what it has done to Ecuador and even to Edwin to rely on this economy of raw materials.”

  “You can show me whatever you want. But I’m not going to be an ideologue, all right?”

  “So it is bizarre for you that I believe in something? What do you believe in then, besides a hairless future for the Western world?”

  “I believe in things, Brigid. I believe in myself.”

  “And your self that you believe in, what does it believe in?”

  Around this time I seemed to feel something tickle my dangling hand—a brush of coarse fur seemed to slip across my fingertips. I hoped to God it wasn’t a spider and yanked my hand back under the net. “How about love?” I hurriedly said, tucking the net under my sleep sack and sealing myself off. “Love I believe in. But then I admit that love is like family, which I acknowledge it can lead to, and which likewise seems to be a fairly painful institution. Hmm . . . Well, let’s see . . . Other convictions and beliefs. Sex—enjoyable. TV—diverting. Sleep—refreshing. Free trade—on balance a good thing. You see how I could go on. And life in general, Brigid, I would have to say is maybe a very mixed blessing—but I do believe the blessing part is there.” I thought a little. “So I’m very anti-death, as a conviction. Therefore anti-spider.”

  I’d never touched a tarantula before. But that was really what it felt like I had touched.

  “I don’t like death either. In Ecuador the first cause of death is children’s diarrhea.”

  “Well obviously I’m against that. And don’t think I don’t have any political convictions. I’m a Democrat, definitely. I’d vote for any of them.”

  “Oh good night to you. We’ll discuss your creeds in the morning.”

  It was true that the Democrats seemed like a pretty lame finale.

  I lay there listening to the Oriente. It hissed and hissed like some big leak in the humungous withering beach ball of the damaged earth. The spider or spiders had really changed the tone of this toneless sound. “I don’t know about this jungle, Bridge. I mean didn’t humanity, in order to be human—didn’t we decide to get out of a place like this? You know, head down to the nice soft savannah instead? Maybe deforestation isn’t so bad if we get rid of all the places like this. I’m sorry, but so what if the world gets a little hotter. You could turn the whole disoriente into a golf course. What do you think?”

  “What do you think? You don’t think any of this. Bonne nuit,” she said unpleasantly. “Fais de doux rêves.”

  “You don’t believe in anything either,” I pointed out. “Anthropology? Indigenous absolutism? Belgium? What are you doing next?”

  And now I just lay there with my eyes shut in order not to glimpse a roaming or stalled patch of pure blackness suspended on the netting a few inches from my face. I couldn’t decide whether to apologize to Brigid or what. My arachnophobia had rarely seemed so severe, or my abulia either.

  Maybe ten minutes had passed when I noticed these weird little rhythmical sighs she was making, complete with heavy breathing. Until then I’d figured she was asleep. I couldn’t believe it! I listened to the suspicious stifled sounds, then heard a telltale whimper. Apparently she was one of those perverted girls who get turned on by having a fight! At this juncture our mutual loneliness seemed basically consummated and, filled with indignation, I resorted to my own genitalia and started doing what I could. Alas my dick felt difficult to convince of any abstract lust, and nothing was working until I hit upon an image of naked dark Brigid walking ahead of me up some spiral staircase. This pleasant picture was curiously succeeded by the memory of Vaneetha undoing her white Oxford shirt beneath the mirror-faceted party globe spinning slowly on a cord dropped from the Chambers St. ceiling, and now Natasha climbed on the merry-go-round of pornographic imagery and rode by naked as could be, smiling her Joker’s smile. But here was Brigid again, turning around at the top of the stairs—

  “What—may I ask you what are you doing there?” Real-life Brigid had interrupted my fantasy, in which tiny propellers were spinning on her two pasties.

  At length my dick had obeyed and now I was—“I’m jerking off,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m masturbating—I’m manually stimulating my penis in pursuit of orgasm?” I stalled out in my exertions. “What are you doing?”

  “I was crying a little—if you want to know it.” You could hear in her ragged voice it was true.

  “Oh . . .” Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.

  “I had so looked forward to you, Dwight. I had such an idea of you.”

  I didn’t say anything. Then I said, “Well I had some ideas too. About Natasha. But Natasha doesn’t know me, and I don’t know her. So I’m sorry about any ideas she gave you but—”

  “But what has happened to you today?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Yet while this statement was strictly and even somewhat harrowingly accurate—all at once in a surge of shame I gave up on Brigid, the bobohuariza, and Abulinix—it was also true that the nonoccurrence felt like one of my bigger life-events to date.

  “Nor to me,” Brigid said with some sort of a sad/angry snort and sniffle combination. “True, you are nothing. Return to your pleasure, go ahead. I hope you are imagining the sight of many hairless people in orgy together?”

  EIGHTEEN

  Eventually Brigid fell asleep for real. Somehow even pitch black goes dimmer with the subtraction of one consciousness, and you can tell.

  I had no intention of touching my penis then or ever again. Yet among the pornographic images I’d entertained, one of them was planted in an actual historical sequence of real and undeniable events, and now with my hands at my side I helplessly watched a certain episode from my past play through my mind like some small-hours rerun on TV.

  Vaneetha was standing near t
he doorway, saying that while Ford’s birthday party hadn’t made for much of a date, at least it had helped to make up for the dreadful one endured the weekend before with a young man of the same caste whom her parents regarded as a decent marriage prospect. “I’ll have to bow to them eventually. But I think I may have several years of holding out. And your parents? Do they also want you to find someone from the, er—”

  “No articulated policy. Actually I think mom is very pro-miscegenation. Because she’s like look at the WASPs. Alcoholism, listlessness.”

  “You might end up with anyone.”

  “Except you.” Involuntarily I sighed with relief and she laughed.

  Yet it was a relief that, as well as things were going—with several vodka gimlets behind me, the fantastic sensation of improved mental health which I’d derived from beginning psychoanalysis that morning with Alice, and now this lovely woman before me—marriage was already ruled out, and I could proceed more or less anxiety-free.

  “This nice Indian boy,” Vaneetha was saying, “didn’t even have a favorite French film when I asked.” Her enunciation remained impressively elocutionary despite a slight drink blur at the edges. “I’m curious—what would you say is your favorite French film?”

  “My F.F.F.? Hmm . . .” I told her that at some point I had seen a movie in which all these beaming brightly-attired people, singing French words, had danced around with twirling Technicolor umbrellas. Then I remembered the title: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I couldn’t tell if her expression commented on my pronunciation or my choice, nor were the possibilities logically incompatible. “Well it just seemed to be this colorful utopia of cheerful nonsense,” I said. “So I loved it. I know I might suffer a lot in later life. So in the meantime I try to avoid art having to do with suffering. Or the human condition.”