Arue Women’s Prison
AS I LOOK OVER THIS NOW, on the point of sending it off to you, I remember how I felt while writing. It was two months ago—February—a month of constant rain. I was very low. Eighty days in here. Jail was ceasing to be cruel and unusual, starting to seem cruel and normal, a torment curving over the horizon.
Bob and the Canadian consul came to see me in the “bank,” the visiting room, which has a counter down the middle with a wall of bars and mesh to the ceiling. Things were going well, they claimed. Their faces said otherwise. When the consul left, Bob took my hands through a small wicket where prisoners and visitors can touch, pass cigarettes. Amazing what a charge can crackle through one’s fingers. Like being thirteen again.
Our time was nearly up but Toho, the warder—a mountainous Tahitian overflowing her blue uniform and orange plastic chair—smiled as if to say, go ahead, all the world loves lovers, and left us alone in the room. She’d never done this before, and I should have been grateful. But on that day, in that mood, unsure of things, especially myself, all I thought was: They know me now. L’écrivaine. Not a runner or a doer. They’ve stopped worrying Bob’s going to slip me a baguette with a file inside. And I knew I didn’t deserve Bob.
“Aren’t you tired of coming here?”
“I’ll never get tired of being with you, Liv. Wherever you are.” He kissed the palm of my hand. “You’re salty.” He nodded at the jailer’s empty chair. “Look at that!”
“They think I’m resigned. A zoo creature. They can leave the cage open and it won’t leave. Spirit broken.” I burst into tears. “Sorry. This is one of those days when I’d feel better if I’d actually done something. Something really nasty.”
“I prefer you innocent.”
“I’m not innocent.” I withdrew my hand. “And it’s high time you knew.”
“Christ, Liv!”
“No, not that! But I’m not the nice girl you think I am.”
This was the first time I told him about you. The essentials. My test of Bob’s faith, of his idea of me.
“At least now you know for sure I’ll never want another kid. I couldn’t risk it all going wrong again—blighting others’ lives.”
“You shouldn’t be so altruistic, Liv. Don’t get hung up on what you imagine might happen to others.” He was thinking the best of me, as he always does.
“It’s not altruism. It’s for me. I can’t risk another load of guilt. I’ve carried this around for more than twenty years. If I add another ounce I’ll sink.” I took his hand and squeezed it. “I’m a shit. I should’ve told you all this ages ago. Long before you threw away your life and came out here.”
“Nothings been thrown away.” He stroked my fingers one by one, perhaps regretfully. “I’m working on Loti’s Mariage, remember? Not wrecking mine. You mustn’t take things on yourself so much.”
I didn’t seem to have diminished in his eyes, or shocked him, put him off. For he answered my secret with a secret of his own: why he’d left America in 1970.
“You’ve heard of the Kent State shooting, right?”
“The song was everywhere when I came to Canada. ‘Four Dead in Ohio.’ But you already told me you left because of Vietnam.”
“It was more personal than that.”
Bob said he’d been a “bit of a radical,” roaming from campus to campus in an old Chevrolet with a young girlfriend who wove tapestries from seashells and doghair.
“I was having the time of my life. And all for a good cause. Then the National Guard shot those kids.”
“You were there?”
“Thousands of miles away. In Berkeley. I was desperate to get there for the protest. I guess I thought—” (a dry laugh, more a squeak) “—my presence would stop Nixon flattening Cambodia. But Barbara was sick. Food poisoning, she said. I dithered. Then she seemed over the worst, so I left. Driving day and night, an hour’s sleep here and there on the back seat.” His voice fell. “The car had no radio. I was in Denver before I knew what had happened in Ohio. I rang Barb. No answer. Eventually I raised a friend. She was in hospital. It was blood poisoning, not food. Sepsis. She must have cut herself. She was always doing that. Poor Barb had hands like a fisherman.”
They hadn’t any money or medical insurance. He found her in a San Francisco charity ward. He sold his car and got her moved. But Barbara died within days. Bob left the States forever, appalled at his nation and himself.
“It was hardly your fault,” I said. His hands were shivering in mine.
“Oh, sure. It was the war. It was Nixon. It was America. You probably think America’s a modern country. America likes to think it’s the only modern country. It isn’t. It’s primitive. A land of social Darwinists who don’t believe Darwin. A decent hospital won’t touch you if you can’t flash a credit card!
“Circumstances pile up,” he went on, “and you can unpile them any way you like after. But the difference between bad luck and tragedy lies in knowing what truly matters. When it matters. The thing—the thing I’d give anything to change—is I didn’t know that. I didn’t think.”
I followed his gaze to a gecko high on the wall, wagging its head slowly from side to side as if it had heard and sympathized. Or disapproved. There was nothing else to say. He’d gone over and over his loss, as I had mine, for twenty years.
Toho returned, sinking cautiously onto her flimsy chair, ending the confessional. Bob got up to go. We tried kissing through the wire—not something we usually did. Too many others had done it, the mesh greasy with lipstick and lushly scented monoi.
• • •
It wasn’t long after this that my outlook began to improve. Alain Tremblay, the Canadian consul, began coming more often, genuine cheer in his voice. He’d managed, at last, to get his superiors in Canada to make some diplomatic noise—no easy matter, given the tender state of relations between Ottawa and Paris ever since de Gaulle’s “Québec libre” outburst.
Alain has become a real friend, but I remember my disappointment the first time we met. I’d expected someone older, more worldly, a heavyweight—not this slight, boyish man in white suit and black polo shirt that made him look like a tropical priest. He wore a rather floral cologne and a tiny pair of wire-rimmed glasses, perched on a nose even bigger than mine. He was younger than me, and Tahiti was his first foreign posting. I couldn’t take him seriously.
His English was slangy and fluent, a Montreal accent I remembered from the years at Studio D. In my despair I thought he might be a Francophile with separatist sympathies, merely going through the motions, someone who’d never rock the boat. He didn’t say much that first time. Just listened (that took patience!), explained he’d have to make his own enquiries.
I needn’t have worried; Alain is no Gaullist. Now he’s embroiled in this sticky political mess, the resolution of which may soon get us both out of Tahiti: me home to Vancouver, and him to a more senior but less agreeable posting such as Lima or Kiev.
My problem is the people I was with. Not that they’re killers. Quite the contrary. They were interested in exposing death of a different order: the slow and possibly abundant death from the nuclear mess at Moruroa Atoll, where the French government tests its bombs. I’ll come to this later; but in short the authorities know perfectly well we have nothing to do with that dead girl. This isn’t just my view—Consul Tremblay said so too.
“We know you’re not guilty. The French know you’re not guilty. This isn’t about the law. Soon as I can raise enough pressure, or we get near court, they’ll let you go. Though you’ll have to go quietly. Nothing to the press. It’s a matter of face. We bring in the press only as a last resort. In my job we catch more flies with honey than vinegar—you can say this in English?”
We were smoking our way through the Gauloises he’d brought. I’d begun to trust Alain by then, but wasn’t sure I trusted his optimism. I didn’t like the sound of “last resort.”
“This is just theatre,” he was coughing into his sleeve. “To make people like your friends think twice about poking around. And put the Rainbow Warrior sinking in the shade. That was a big cock-up. … They killed a guy. Even if they didn’t mean to. And they got caught. Very embarrassing.”
“I know. I’ve heard all about it.”
“They play hardball down here. Before this they played hardball with Pouvanaa.”
“With what?”
“Tahiti’s Nelson Mandela. Pouvanaa a Oopa. He died about ten years ago.”
“They killed him?”
“Just locked him up and threw away the key. The guy was past eighty when he died. … Sorry! Don’t worry—you’re no Pouvanaa! But they play rough here. Always have. Though they may have to lighten up if the Cold War goes away, like people are saying. Not so easy to justify this crap.” He chuckled scornfully and lowered his voice. “It’s a joke. All this nuclear shit going down for twenty-five years and they’ve got about as much firepower as one U.S. submarine.”
Alain opened a fresh pack, tapped one out for himself and passed the rest under the wire. He cocked an eyebrow. “This is all off the record, Liv. Anything I say that’s worth hearing, I haven’t said. Diplomats are dead men. We don’t tell tales. The nearest we get to the truth is to give it a massage.”
I flew back to Canada from Hitchin in September—the September before last—back to my desirably situated apartment with its panoramas of water vapour and crippling mortgage. Things I’d shipped from Tilehouse Street began to arrive: Jon’s photos, his books, Henderson’s papers, Mother’s china. The spear took months by sea in a container.
My flat was built to save money and make the world safe for vacuum cleaners—no skirting, no picture rail, no trim around doors and windows. Economies justified by the International Style. A previous owner in bourgeois despair had added a cosmetic fireplace with fake coals and a red bulb. Above this hideous fixture I hung Frank Henderson’s spear.
It is fourteen feet three inches long (4.3 metres, if that’s how you think) and carved from a dense dark wood that Mother used to call ebony. She was right about the weight. How could even the burliest warrior have wielded such a thing? I had to haul it up the outside of the building with a rope and bring it in over the balcony—unlawful, no doubt, but the delivery man helped me and we got the job done without breaking glass or impaling pedestrians.
Far from lending mystique, the spear lay reproachfully on my wall, accentuating the starkness, underlining Mother’s death, the dispersal of a family past; and how much I missed Tilehouse Street, its cracks and ghosts, the smell of soot, the sprung floors that foretold who was coming down a passage, into a room.
It was mid-January. The whale film had aired the night before. Bob came up with flowers and a bottle of the Widow. By then we were seeing each other discreetly about once a week.
A great success, he insisted. So did friends and colleagues who rang. But hearing their voices only depressed me. I felt guilty for neglecting them. Friendship shrinks to a string of airy promises when I’m busy. Above all, I missed my “real” friends, women I’d got to know in my twenties and left behind in Montreal. The older one gets the harder it becomes to make those friends.
My West Coast friends I’ve met through work: a composer who does soundtracks, a sculptor who pays her way building stage sets. And Jane, a script editor who lives nearby. It was Jane who helped me find the flat. We have lunch, jog around Stanley Park sometimes, but I haven’t told anyone in Vancouver about you, or Bob.
All I could think was: What now? What next? And the answer seemed to be that I was finished, that there was no way forward except to give up my pretensions, get a waitressing job.
“Fantastic, Liv. Well done! I didn’t think about whales much. Except Moby Dick. Now I care.”
“Don’t patronize me, Robert. Tell the truth. Was it awful? What were the ads?”
“You mean you missed it?”
“I never watch them air. The last stage I sees the rehearsal print. Cant bear it otherwise. The rehearsal print’s as good as a film ever gets. It’s the last cut. All the other cutting—months and months of it—you’ve done on a grotty old work print covered in finger-smears and scratches. Looks like shit, but that’s what you work with. Till the rehearsal. For the first time it’s cut from your original negative by nice ladies in silk gloves. It’s shown in a beautiful auditorium with perfect sound. It’s breathtaking. And everyone comes, and they are breathtaken. It’s the moment of truth and beauty. So why watch it again?”
He started to speak. I put an olive in his mouth and a whisky in his hand. “Drink this and listen. When it comes out of that box in the corner there, with its muddy little screen and tinny speakers, my film’s ruined. And every ten minutes someone butts in and tries to sell me Tampax.”
“Give yourself a break, Liv. It looked wonderful. They weren’t selling Tampax. It was four-wheel-drives and winter cruises.”
“You see! You remember the fucking commercials. Cruises in a film on whales! Have you any idea how many marine mammals are carved up every year by ships’ propellers? How many turtles choke to death on all the plastic bags they dump over the side? Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they’re selling. Everyone I know in this business feels the same. You find the best locations, the best cameraman, great music—and when it’s squeezed into that horrid little frame and interrupted by inane propaganda it looks just like everything else.”
“Oh,” he said, taken aback. “I thought tuning in to your latest would be like walking into Duthie’s and seeing your own book in the window. I never get tired of that.”
His eyes were roaming, searching for a change of subject. “That’s extraordinary. Am I so unobservant? Or wasn’t it here last time?”
“Just arrived. An ancestor—well, a cousin really—brought it back from Africa in the 1890s. We’ve always called it the assegai.”
He walked the length of the spear, taking his time.
“Awful big for an assegai. Assegais are short stabbing things with steel blades. Like the Zulus have. Take a look next time Chief Buthelezi’s pals are on the news.”
“Well, that’s what my mother used to call it. The assegai. As if it mattered somehow. She was funny about it. Always said it would be mine one day. Don’t know why—she’d never let me touch it.”
“I’ve seen things like this at the museum in Honolulu. I’d say it came from the Pacific. But I don’t know this stuff. We should get someone over here from anthropology. They must have an Africanist. Or there’s always Dermot Hough in astronomy.…”
“Astronomy?”
“He collects African and Melanesian carvings. His sidelines ethno-astronomy. Ancient star maps, constellations. We have lunch at the faculty club once in a while. Trouble with Dermot is he’ll talk your ear off. His students call him the Gas Giant.”
Bob took his drink and went to the window, ice chiming in his glass. The setting sun had oozed through a bank of mist, a ragged fir against the redness like stitching on a wound.
“How long have you been living up here, Liv? Looking at this ocean. Isn’t it time to go there? You should take a trip. You need one. Really.”
“Last time I took the boat to Nanaimo a kid threw up on my shoes.”
“I mean a real trip. Hawaii, Fiji. Melville’s mysterious divine Pacific. The tide-beating heart of Earth! We’ll go together. You come up with a film project. I’ll find some writers to visit.”
I was thinking: If he’s alive, he’s sixty-eight. If I go out there I must go and go until I reach Korea. Until I find him. Or find nothing. Or bones in a jungle. A skull and some brass buttons in a killing field.
Bob left. Night came down on the sea, the ships lighting up one by one in the roadstead, pricking the dusk on the bay. It felt good to be alone. The whale film was dead to me, and Melville with it.
I switched on the TV, hopped channels, switched off. The Hitchin books and papers were stacked in a corner, untouched except to check they’d all arrived. I picked up Jon’s school atlas, the one I’d saved from Mole. On the flyleaf:
Jonathan Wyvern, Fifth Form,
Harepark School, Waiden St. Lawrence,
Near Hitchin, Hertfordshire,
England, Great Britain, Europe,
The World, Solar System,
Milky Way, The Universe.
My father at eleven or twelve, locating himself at the centre of creation, as all kids do; now lost to the world. And there, near the back, was Korea, which I’d looked at so many times in other atlases, and which still seemed unknowable as Madagascar or Mongolia. I had a good cry, then got another drink. I went on leafing through idly, hoping for something—a doodle, a scribble, an inky fingerprint. But Jon must have been a respecter of books, even as a boy. Or maybe he just didn’t like geography. Only Northeast Asia was smudgy, where Mothers finger had often brushed the mountains of Korea.
The Pacific lay across the centre pages, an ocean hemisphere, the cracked spine like a geological fault. A bookmark, a blue paper or card snagged in the binding, broke loose and fluttered to the floor.
An airmail envelope. Jon’s handwriting. Addressed to Mother at Tilehouse Street.
The flap was partly stuck; I tore it open savagely. Inside were two sheets, covered in small script on both sides, as if this was all the paper he had.
Dear Vivien,
I’m alive (obviously) and safe. Aboard a copra schooner, the Bremerhaven, Captain Westermann. Typical Jerry, obliging enough but vague about his war. You’ll have had a telegram, I assume. “Missing in action.” I can imagine what you’re going through. So I’m posting this off at first port of call, before anything else. I’ll wire as soon I can.
Your last letter’s still in my pocket. It’s been in the drink—hard to read now—but I know every word. Should’ve answered in Korea, but couldn’t think what to say. Then I got overtaken by events. Still haven’t the foggiest notion how to respond to what you’ve told me, though I’d guessed something of the sort. The trick is to think clearly about the future, and I can’t seem to manage that yet. A lot will depend on how things go when we make land tomorrow.
I’ll get on with the easy bit—my ditching. Nothing heroic, just ran out of juice like a young fool. Usually they sent us to the Yalu, but that morning we were scrambled south, behind our own lines. Surprise attack. Bandits on the radar. My wingman found them—cheeky sod went off and jumped a MiG.
It was early, the sun still rising. We chased them out over the China Sea, above a layer of cirrus like the skin of a goldfish. I don’t miss Korea one bit, but I miss those skies. Then a MiG jumped me. First real fight in weeks. I put some daylight in his tail but nothing more.
They’d given me a Sabre—quicker kite than my Meteor but shorter range. I remembered this too late. Sheer bloody incompetence. Hadn’t slept soundly for a fortnight, but that’s no excuse in war.
I carried on south, looking for Okinawa or one of our carriers, holding the best airspeed till she flamed out. She was lightheaded without fuel but steady, gliding down gracefully, the cirrus turning to floss and gone at thirty thousand. Then just open sea, the risen sun, and the Sabre falling, eerily silent, a seven-ton paper dart.
I must say, Vivien, that it was dreadfully tempting to ride down all the way. There are things you don’t know—I won’t go into them now—and that hissing stillness was hypnotic. I felt paralysed, or perhaps I blacked for a while. Didn’t snap out till I was under five thousand. The sea saved me, the sight of it—like hammered steel coming up to smack me in the face. And I saw a steamer, a rusty old bucket, her plates blazing in the sun.
Bailed out about two thousand. First time ever—quite a shock—like being slapped with a tennis racket from a passing car. They picked me up in an hour or so. Chinese, though Red or Kuomintang I never found out. We were evens there (I’d dumped my tags). Not a word of English but great mah-jong players. Fishermen, I gathered, outward bound for the Line Islands. I wanted them to put me on a British possession, but they stuck to the high seas. (They were up to something, smuggling most likely.) Didn’t see land for weeks. So I had them hand me over to this little schooner off the Lines. I gave the Chinese half my parachute to make silk thingies for their wives. Westermann says he’ll take the rest for a passage to Tahiti (if I go that far on his tub).
You’ll get a better letter from me soon. There’s a lot I have to get straight in my mind. And I have to find him, if I can. Please understand this. I mean him no harm. It’s just impossible to come so close and pass on by. Sometimes it seems to me that my fetching up here, of all places, must be providential. Barmy I suppose—there’s so little land out here it’s probably nothing extraordinary.
No matter what, Vivien, it’ll be some time before I come home. I hadn’t meant to say this yet but I’d better get it off my chest—I’m not sure whether I can come home. I need your patience. A lot of patience. Truth is, I’m none too well. The job’s rather caught up with me. So best not to tell the girls you’ve heard anything. We’ll cross this one next time I write.
Kiss them for me, Jon
PS. Westermann says Korea’s over—says a truce has held. By God, I hope he’s right!
I don’t know how many times I read it, swept along in a flash-flood of emotion, revelation, joy, panic. Mother’s certainty of Jon’s return made sense for the first time. She’d known he hadn’t died in Korea. The odds he might still be alive increased enormously, despite his talk of illness. And what of that? Once I calmed down it struck me as an excuse. The letter sounded wary, distant, even chilly. Something was wrong between them. Who the hell was this “him”? Why didn’t Jon sign off with love, as he did in his earlier letters, all four? Where was the following letter—the one he promised? And why, if he never came home, didn’t Mother go looking for him? (This is something I still don’t know. I can’t answer every question for you.) Or had Jon come back to England after all? Had there been some showdown in Hitchin, too painful for Mother to reveal?
Another pain took me by surprise, though I should have seen it coming. Suddenly I felt abandoned, not bereaved. I’m sure you know this all too well, no matter how lucky you’ve been with your adoptive parents. Perhaps you think I deserve a taste of it. (I agree.) It occurred to me then that any fact of Jon’s survival must also be a fact of his abandonment of Lottie and me, whatever the circumstances. And of Mother of course; but she seemed implicated in both the cause and the concealment.
The letter seemed to have been written at two slightly different times, his hand spidery in his words to Mother, steadier in his telling of the crash, as if he’d copied that part from something already written, perhaps a despatch he meant to send. He’d put no date. The stamp—faded and stained, the design some tropical flower, half missing even before I tore it—seemed to be from a French territory. I could just make out … merits Français d l’O … And part of the postmark: … aiohae. I got a magnifying glass. The name was no clearer. But the date stood out: 19-IX-53. He’d reached land somewhere between the Line Islands and Tahiti—perhaps Tahiti itself—two months after his crash.
I combed every place-name in the index, looking for the sequence … aiohae. Nothing. I slept fitfully that night, a sleeping pill on top of booze, but was up at six and on the doorstep of the Vancouver Library when it opened. The map room soon supplied a perfect match: Taiohae, a town on an island called Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas group, northeast of Tahiti.
I broke the rules, ringing Bob at the English department, babbling onto his message tape. He met me for lunch at a Greek restaurant, clearly worried about my stability. The shock of my discovery had disoriented me. I couldn’t think. I’d even begun to fear that the letter might turn to ashes, prove to be some sort of fake. Bob heard me out, eating steadily while my moussaka congealed. Then he examined the stamp and postmark carefully.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s Nuku Hiva. And the date checks out fine. The Etablissements Français de l’Océanie changed their name to Polynésie Française soon after, in the mid-fifties.”
He promised to write to an author he knew who lived on Tahiti, a Lars Lindqvist. “Lars owes me. He came to the Vancouver Writers’ Festival a few years back on my recommendation. Why don’t you draw up a list of questions for him? And he’ll be the first person to see if you decide to go there. The guy’s been around.” The name meant nothing to me just then, but this was one of Bob’s great understatements; Lindqvist had sailed with Heyerdahl on the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947.
I rang Lottie. A sleepy male voice said she was “on tour.” He’d tell her I’d called. Meanwhile I haunted the library, reading anything that might help me understand. The Marquesas were remote, far off airline routes and shipping lanes: a thousand miles from Tahiti, two thousand from Hawaii, three thousand from Peru. They were rugged and sparsely inhabited. There hadn’t been an airstrip on any of them until well into the sixties. Taiohae, capital of Nuku Hiva and the whole group, had only eight hundred inhabitants at last count, and far fewer in 1953. Mail from there would have taken months. Did Jon just post his letter and sail on to Tahiti with the trading schooner? Or could he still be there, incognito, a sallow old white man with a local wife and family?
If he was there, he’d be known. Everyone’s business is an open book in a place that size. The size of a school. Even if he left years ago, people would remember him. Then I thought of those Japanese soldiers who wander out of the bush from time to time on Pacific islands, still fighting a war that ended in Nagasaki. Could Jon have hidden in the mountains? But if he’d meant to hide, why write at all?
And how should I read this letter, anyway? How rational was he? I recalled Mole’s speculation on Jon’s state of mind, that he might have had upsetting news. What on Earth had Mother told him? Had it cost him his sleep—and nearly his life? Was the illness mentioned physical or mental? From what I thought I knew of Jon, he wasn’t the type to be in awe of “providence.” The stuff about looking for someone—someone they both seemed to know—and “meaning no harm” became more and more worrying as I brooded on it.
Then I remembered that the Henderson papers I’d found had been hidden, or at least put away very thoroughly, presumably by Jon. Given Mothers oddness about the spear, it seemed just possible there might be some Henderson relation out in Nuku Hiva or Tahiti. A black sheep, perhaps. Or even someone connected to Mother’s being “disowned.”
While in the Pacific shelves I looked at spears in Munro’s Polynesian Woodwork and Clunie’s darkly brilliant Fijian Weapons and Warfare. There was a macabre ingenuity and range of design: multiple prongs, detachable points, poisoned barbs, sting-ray spines, and one type “formed of a wood which bursts when moist, so that it can scarcely be extracted from a wound.” Nothing illustrated was exactly like Henderson’s spear, but there were things similar enough that Bob had to be right: it was from the South Seas, probably the Society Islands—Tahiti and its neighbours. Just possibly it had come from further afield, from the Marquesas.
Lottie rang back at last (Will you accept charges?) and we ran up a huge transatlantic bill. By then I was lost in a labyrinth of betrayal and intrigue so overwrought I can scarcely retrace it for you now. Jon, I was sure, had had a nervous breakdown shortly before his crash. He’d ditched his plane on purpose, a failed suicide. Then he’d shipped Mother the spear from Nuku Hiva, a bizarre gift to stand in stead of his return. The “assegai” was Marquesan, and she’d insisted it was African to throw us off, to make us believe she knew nothing of her mad, dishonoured husband, who even now might be shuffling round an asylum in Tahiti, or France, or England.
For the first time in my life it occurred to me that my mother, by hiding all this from me, making me fatherless, was partly to blame for you. Then it came to me that I—my birth—might be to blame for what went wrong. Was I my fathers daughter?
Lottie listened aghast, unnaturally silent. She didn’t share my urgency and outrage. She had clearer memories of our parents’ life together, had known Jon almost twice as long as I. Lottie couldn’t imagine him a suicide, let alone a deserter, even from a morally repugnant war. And she swore that everything she’d said over the years about my looks was only a joke. She thought I was cracking up.
“You’ve just finished a film, Liv, haven’t you? In a month’s time you’ll be on to the next one, and all this will be back in proportion. We both need time to digest.” I heard her hand muffle the receiver as she called out to someone; then: “I really wish I’d burnt that sodding spear. But no matter what happened to Jon, it can’t have anything to do with him. I’m positive. You may not be old enough, Liv, but I am. I can remember seeing it on that wall all my life—long before he went missing. That spear was Henderson’s. Or one of the Henderson’s’. Has to be.”
I sat in the window, gazing at the bay and the long whale-back of Vancouver Island. A paleness was gathering on the sea, the water turning soft and white, the whiteness thickening like light on film. All at the speed of a clock’s hands.
For weeks on end through the early months of 1989 my view was stolen by fog. I saw little of the bay or islands, knew nothing of the ships except their didgeridoo exhaust and doleful warnings answered by the glasses in my cupboard.
Bob came over whenever he could get an afternoon or a rare evening. I’d cook for him, or he’d cook in my kitchen. We’d switch on the cosmetic fire below the spear, get gently drunk in one another’s arms. He was a good listener. I wanted to be away at once, but there was no point in going to the Marquesas for a two-week trip. I had to plan for half a year, or more. My search for Jon would begin on Nuku Hiva, but it might take me anywhere. French Polynesia was far-flung and expensive. I needed real money. And I’d have to rent out the flat.
One day he brought a small gift in a paper bag, presenting it in both hands with a little Asian bow. “Maybe this’ll help you think. Melville’s first book. Few people know it nowadays, but during his lifetime it outsold everything else he did. It’s a true story, more or less. It’s about Nuku Hiva. And running away.”
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. A lovely old edition that must have set him back a bit. Several Widows. The endpaper was an early map of the Marquesas Islands, sketchy, almost fanciful. I studied their simple shorelines and archaic names. Santa Christina, or Taouata; Washington Island, or Houa-houna; Marchand Island, or Nukuheva. And on Nuku Hiva was Typee, the “cannibal valley” where Melville was held captive after jumping off a whaleship.
• • •
Things fell slowly into place. Lottie warmed to the idea of a South Sea “expedition,” as she called it, as long as I didn’t expect her to come. She still thought I was mad, but knew I’d never rest until I’d done it. We agreed to sell Jon’s old bike, she insisting I take all the proceeds. “You do the search for both of us, Liv. If there’s any cash left over we’ll argue about it when you get back.”
Bob helped me work up a film proposal on Typee—to get seed money for research while I was there. The centenary of Melville’s death would be in ’91. Two and a half years away; tight but possible. It was a good idea on its own merits, but mainly I think he wanted me to have something on hand besides my quest for Jon, something to help me through the many false leads and dead ends I was likely to find. Not to mention total failure.
Apart from this proposal, I took on nothing except short-term work that paid well—keeping the decks clear so I could leave when ready. I’d forgotten what “whoring” was like: shooting ski gear at Whistler, ordering “heroes” for frozen food commercials (heroes are those suspiciously perfect grapes, tomatoes, sticks of celery, etc., that appear in loving close-up).
I lived on pasta, saved every penny, had dreams of Melville and major studio backing. (My proposal has yet to raise riches, but it brought in a few grand from Telefilm Canada and Blue Angel, a Los Angeles soft-core outfit with conscience money to burn.) Mostly, of course, I dreamed of Jon and Mother, of old schooners and green islands, of a warplane sailing down from the sky.