They wind up a hillside, past houses she can make out only dimly. The headlights shine on massive bushes overhanging the road, with flamboyant red and pink flowers dangling from them like Kleenex flowers at a high-school dance. Then they're in the lighted part of town. There are crowds of people on the streetcorners and in front of the shops but they aren't walking, they're just standing or sitting on steps or chairs, as if they're inside a room. Music flows through the open doorways.
Some of the men wear knitted wool caps, like tea cosies, and Rennie wonders how they can stand it in the heat. Their heads turn as the taxi goes by, and some wave and shout, at the driver rather than Rennie. She's beginning to feel very white. Their blacks aren't the same as our blacks, she reminds herself; then sees that what she means by our blacks are the hostile ones in the States, whereas our blacks ought to mean this kind. They seem friendly enough.
Nevertheless Rennie finds their aimlessness disturbing, as she would at home. It's too much like teenagers in shopping plazas, it's too much like a mob. She discovers that she's truly no longer at home. She is away, she is out, which is what she wanted. The difference between this and home isn't so much that she knows nobody as that nobody knows her. In a way she's invisible. In a way she's safe.
When Jake moved out, naturally there was a vacuum. Something had to come in to fill it. Maybe the man with the rope hadn't so much broken into her apartment as been sucked in, by the force of gravity. Which was one way of looking at it, thought Rennie.
Once she would have made this man into a good story; she would have told it at lunch, with the strawberry flan. She wasn't sure what stopped her, from telling anyone at all. Perhaps it was that the story had no end, it was open-ended; or perhaps it was too impersonal, she had no picture of the man's face. When she was outside, walking along the street, she looked at the men who passed her in a new way: it could be any one of them, it could be anyone. Also she felt implicated, even though she had done nothing and nothing had been done to her. She had been seen, too intimately, her face blurred and distorted, damaged, owned in some way she couldn't define. It wasn't something she could talk about at lunch. Anyway, she didn't want to become known as a man-hater, which was what happened when you told stories like that.
The first thing she did after the policemen had gone was to get the lock fixed. Then she had safety catches put on the windows. Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was being watched, even when she was in a room by herself, with the curtains closed. She had the sense that someone had been in her apartment while she was out, not disarranging anything, but just looking into her cupboards, her refrigerator, studying her. The rooms smelled different after she'd been out. She began to see herself from the outside, as if she was a moving target in someone else's binoculars. She could even hear the silent commentary: Now she's opening the bean sprouts, now she's cooking an omelette, now she's eating it, now she's washing off the plate. Now she's sitting down in the livingroom, nothing much going on. Now she's getting up, she's going into the bedroom, she's taking off her shoes, she's turning out the light. Next comes the good part.
She began to have nightmares, she woke up sweating. Once she thought there was someone in the bed with her, she could feel an arm, a leg.
Rennie decided she was being silly and possibly neurotic as well. She didn't want to turn into the sort of woman who was afraid of men. It's your own fear of death, she told herself. That's what any armchair shrink would tell you. You think you're dying, even though you've been saved. You should be grateful, you should be serene and profound, but instead you're projecting onto some pathetic weirdo who's never going to bother you again. That scratching you heard at the window last night wasn't coming from the outside at all.
Which was all very well, but the man existed; he was an accident that had almost happened to her; he was an ambassador, from some place she didn't want to know any more about. The piece of rope, which was evidence, which the police had taken away with them, was also a message; it was someone's twisted idea of love. Every time she went into her bedroom she could see it, coiled on the bed, even though it was no longer there.
In itself it was neutral, and useful too, you could use it for all kinds of things. She wondered whether he'd intended to strangle her with it or just tie her up. He hadn't wanted to be drunk, there had been beer and half a bottle of wine in the refrigerator, she was sure he'd looked, and he'd chosen Ovaltine. He'd wanted to know what he was doing. When he got as far as the scar perhaps he would have stopped, apologized, untied her, gone home, to the wife and children Rennie was certain he had. Or perhaps he knew, perhaps that's what turned him on. Mr. X, in the bedroom, with a rope.
And when you pulled on the rope, which after all reached down into darkness, what would come up? What was at the end, the end? A hand, then an arm, a shoulder, and finally a face. At the end of the rope there was someone. Everyone had a face, there was no such thing as a faceless stranger.
Rennie is late for dinner. She has to wait at the front desk while they set a table for her in the diningroom. Around the corner, where she can't see, a tray of silverware hits the floor and there's an argument in low voices. After fifteen minutes a waitress comes out and says sternly that Rennie can go in now, as if it's a trial rather than a meal.
As Rennie walks towards the diningroom, a woman with a tan the colour of clear tea walks out of it. She has blonde hair braided and wound around her head, and she's wearing a sleeveless magenta dress with orange flowers on it. Rennie feels bleached.
The woman smiles at her with fluorescent teeth, looking at her with round blue china-doll eyes. "Hi there," she says. Her friendly, glassy stare reminds Rennie of the greeting perfected by hostesses in the restaurants of Holiday Inns. Rennie waits for her to say, "Have a good day." The smile lasts a little too long, and Rennie gropes, wondering if she knows this woman. She decides with relief that she doesn't, and smiles back.
The tables are covered with starched white tablecloths and the wine glasses have linen napkins tucked into them, pleated into fans. Propped against the flower vase, one hibiscus per table, is a small typewritten card which isn't exactly a menu, since there's no choice. The food is brought by three waitresses, in light-blue full-skirted dresses and white aprons and mobcaps. They are totally silent and do not smile; perhaps they've been called away from their own dinners.
Rennie begins to compose, from habit and to pass the time, though she doesn't think the Sunset Inn will find its way into her piece:
The decor is nondescript, resembling nothing so much as an English provincial hotel, with flowered wallpaper and a few prints of hunting and shooting. The ceiling fans add a pleasant touch. We began with the local bread, and butter of perhaps a questionable freshness. Then came (she consulted the menu) a pumpkin soup, which was not the bland version most North Americans may be used to. My companion ...
But there is no companion. It's necessary to have a companion for these excursions, always, if only a paper one. The readers would find the suggestion that you would go to a restaurant and sit there all by yourself, just eating, far too depressing. They want gaiety and the possibility of romance and a mention of the wine list.
Rennie gives up anyway when the roast beef arrives, leathery and khaki and covered with a gravy that tastes like mix. It's garnished with a cube of yam and something light green that has been boiled too long. This is the kind of food you eat only when very hungry.
Rennie is reminded of the put-on piece she did, months ago, on fast-food outlets. It was for Pandora's "Swinging Toronto" section. She'd once done a piece for them on how to pick men up in laundromats, unobtrusively and safely, with addresses of the good laundromats. Check their socks. If they ask to borrow your soap flakes, forget it. The food franchise piece was called "Sawdust Yummies" and the subtitle (not hers) read, "You better take a good thou, 'cause the bread and the wine are nowhere."
She'd covered every McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken spot in the downtown core for it, dutifully t
aking one bite of everything. My companion had the Egg McMuffin, which he found a trifle runny. My buns were chilly.
Rennie picks at the alien vegetables on her plate, gazing around the room. There's only one other diner, a man, who's sitting on the far side of the room reading a paper. In front of him is a dish of what looks like whipped lime Jello. If this were a laundromat, would she pick him up? He turns the page of his newspaper and smiles at her, a half-smile of complicity, and Rennie looks down at her plate. She likes to stare but she doesn't like to be caught doing it.
Eye contact, that was one hint. She's not surprised when he folds the paper, gets up, and heads towards her table.
"It's kind of dumb, sitting across the room from each other like that," he says. "I think this place is empty except for us. Mind if I join you?"
Rennie says no. She has no intention of picking this man up. She never actually picked men up in laundromats, she just went through the preliminaries and then explained that she was doing research. That's what she can always say if necessary. Meanwhile, there's no reason not to be polite.
He goes to the kitchen door and asks for another cup of coffee, and one of the waitresses brings it. She also brings a dish of the green substance for Rennie, and then, instead of returning to the kitchen, sits down at the man's vacated place and finishes off his dessert, staring balefully at him as she does so. The man has his back to her and can't see.
"I wouldn't eat that if I were you," he says.
Rennie laughs and looks at him more carefully. Before the operation, there was a game she used to play with Jocasta, on the street and in restaurants. Pick a man, any man, and find the distinguishing features. The eyebrows? The nose? The body? If this man were yours, how would you do him over? A brush cut, a wet suit? It was a rude game and Rennie knew it. Jocasta, for some reason, didn't. Listen, she'd say. You'd be doing them a favour.
Rennie thinks this man would resist being done over. For one thing, he's too old: he's past the Silly Putty stage. Rennie decides he must be at least forty. His tan is leathery, there are permanent white creases around his eyes. He has a light moustache and post-hippie-length hair, bottom of the earlobes in front, top of the collar in back; it's a little ragged, as if he does it himself with kitchen scissors. He's wearing shorts and a yellow T-shirt without anything written on it. Rennie approves of this. She liked T-shirts with mottoes on them when they first came out, but now she thinks they're jejune.
Rennie introduces herself and mentions that she's a journalist. She always likes to get that in first, before people mistake her for a secretary. The man says his name is Paul and he's from Iowa. "Originally," he says, implying travel. He's not staying at the hotel, he says, just eating there. It's one of the better places.
"If this is better, what's worse?" says Rennie, and they both laugh.
Rennie asks him where home is. It's all right to ask such questions, since Rennie has already decided this does not have the flavour of a pickup. File it under attempt at human contact. He just wants someone to talk to, he's killing time. Which is fine, that's all she's doing herself. If there's anything she doesn't need in her life right now, it's another one of what Jocasta would call those. Nevertheless, she's conscious of a desire to stick her head down under the tablecloth, to see what his knees look like.
"Home?" says Paul. "You mean, where the heart is?"
"Was that a personal question?" says Rennie. She starts to eat the dessert, which appears to be made of sweetened chalk.
Paul grins. "Most of the time I live on a boat," he says. "Over at Ste. Agathe, the harbour's better there. I'm just here for a couple of days, on business."
Rennie feels she's expected to ask what sort of business, so she doesn't. She's decided he will be boring. She's met people with boats before and all they ever talk about is boats. Boats make her seasick. "What sort of boat?" she says.
"Quite a fast one. Actually I have four of them," he says, watching her. Now she's supposed to be impressed.
"I guess that means you're filthy rich," she says.
This time he laughs. "I charter them out," he says. "They're all out now. It's a pain in the ass in some ways. I don't like tourists. They're always complaining about the food, and they throw up too much."
Rennie, who is a tourist, lets this pass. "How did you get four?" she says.
"You can pick them up cheap around here," he says, "from the dead or the disgusted, retired stockbrokers who have heart attacks or decide it's too much trouble scraping off the barnacles. There's a bit of owner piracy too."
Rennie doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of her ignorance, but he smiles at her with his tan folding into pleats around his eyes, he wants her to ask, so she relents and asks.
"People stealing their own boats," he says. "They collect the insurance. Then they sell the boat."
"But you would never do a thing like that," says Rennie. She's paying more attention. No gold earring, no wooden leg, no hooks on the ends of the arms, no parrot. Still, there's something. She looks at his hands, square-fingered and practical, carpenter's hands, on the tablecloth, not doing anything.
"No," he says. "I would never do a thing like that."
He smiles a little, his eyes are light blue, and she recognizes something about him, a deliberate neutrality. He's doing what she does, he's holding back, and now she's really curious.
"Do you have a job?" she says.
"If you have four boats you don't exactly need a job, around here," he says. "I make enough on the charters. I used to have one, I was an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They sent me as an adviser. I was supposed to be telling them what else they can grow here besides bananas. I was pushing red kidney beans. The catch is, nobody really wants them to grow anything here besides bananas. But they wouldn't send me anywhere else, so I kind of retired."
"Where were you before that?" says Rennie.
"Here and there," he says. "A lot of places. I was in Viet Nam, before the war, the official one that is. After that I was in Cambodia." He says this still smiling, but looking at her straight on, a little belligerently, as if he's expecting her to react, with horror or at least disgust.
"What were you doing there?" says Rennie pleasantly, putting down her spoon.
"Advising," he says. "I was always advising. It's not the same as having people do what you say."
"What about?" says Rennie; she feels now as if they're on the radio.
There's a small pause, another crinkled smile. "Rice," he says, watching her closely.
She's being asked for something, but she's not sure what it is. Not admiration, not absolution. Maybe she's not being asked for anything at all, which is just as well, since she doesn't have a whole lot of handouts left. "That must have been interesting," she says. She hasn't done profiles for nothing, she isn't stupid, she knows how to add, she knows there's an X factor. Ten years ago she would have felt entitled to moral outrage, but it's no skin off her nose. People get trapped in things that are beyond their control, she ought to know that by now.
He relaxes, leans back in his chair. She's passed the test, whatever it was. "I'll tell you about it sometime," he says, assuming the future; which is more than she can do.
Rennie's room at the Sunset Inn is papered with a small floral print, pink and blue; there are several pale-orange watermarks near the ceiling, which is fifteen feet high. At the end of the bed, which is single and narrow and covered with a white chenille spread, hangs a picture of a green melon cut open to reveal the seeds. Over the bed itself is a knotted mosquito net, not quite as white as the bedspread. On the night table beside the bed are a Bible, a mosquito coil in a saucer, a box of matches, Three Star, made in Sweden, and a lamp with a pleated paper shade. The lamp is a mermaid with her arms over her head, holding up the bulb. Her breasts aren't bare, she's wearing a harem jacket open at the front, its edges grazing the nipples. In the drawer of the night table are two more mosquito coils in a box labelled Fish Mosquito Destroyer, Blood Pro
tection Co. Ltd.
On the pale-green bureau there's a thermos jug of water, a glass and a hand-printed card warning visitors not to drink the tap water. Rennie opens the drawers. In the centre one is a lime-green blanket, in the bottom one a safety pin. Rennie feels momentarily that she may be spending the rest of her life in rooms like this. Not her own.
She lights the mosquito coil, turns on the mermaid lamp and puts her travelling alarm clock on top of the Bible. She unpacks her cotton nightgown and the zipper bag in which she keeps her toothbrush and the other pieces of cleaning and sterilizing equipment people use on their bodies. She's ceased to take such things for granted; "Prevention of Decay" is no longer just a slogan. She closes the Venetian blind on the narrow window, turns off the overhead light and undresses. The mirror over the bureau is small, so she isn't reflected anywhere.
She takes a shower, in water that refuses to become more than lukewarm. When she comes out of the tiny bathroom, there's a green lizard sticking to the wall beside the window.
She turns down the chenille spread and the sheet and looks carefully in the bed and under the pillow, checking for wildlife. She untwists the mosquito net and tucks it around the bed. Then she crawls into the white tent, turns off the light, and moves to the centre of the bed so that no part of her body is touching the net. She can see the oblong of the window, grey against the darkness, and the glowing end of the mosquito coil. The air is warm and damp, warmer and damper on her skin now than before she took the shower, and the bed smells faintly of mildew.
There are sounds from outside the window, a high cricket sound and a repeated note like a bell or a waterglass being struck, some kind of insect or frog perhaps, and beyond that the insistent syncopated music. Several minutes after she turns out the light a car backfires, or maybe it's firecrackers, and a woman screams with laughter; but that stops and the music keeps going.
Despite the heat Rennie lies with her arms folded, left hand on her right breast, right hand on the ridge of skin that slants across the side of her breast up towards her armpit. This is how she always sleeps now.