A new woman enters my life.
My neighbor Melaina behind the bar.
Then one Saturday afternoon we dropped by the Calypso and everything changed, once again, radically.
When I examine the whole expanse of my life, review it, like one peering from a mountaintop with binoculars, the whole panorama, I can honestly say: every woman I ever loved I met in a bar.
It was about two in the afternoon and Tom and I just happened to drop in for a beer, mostly out of boredom. Willy was at Sammy’s house, the bamboo house, playing with him for the day. The Calypso was what you’d call ‘dead’. We didn’t care. I drove to his place and we walked down the hill and settled in on two stools facing the ocean, ordering our beers. There was a new female bartender there, neither Cindy nor Jaime to be seen. On the other side of the u-shaped bar, sat an older man deep in his cups, oblivious to the world.
A girl in distress.
But there was one other character present, a young woman, skinny and short, sitting in the furthest chair from anyone, at the far edge of the patio, facing the sea, about twenty feet from us, looking out at it. We noticed her of course, as any male notices a single female sitting alone. But we went on talking of our business affairs, sipping our beers for another ten minutes. We ordered a second round but then, with our first sips, we heard the faintest sounds of whimpering.
We turn, looked at the girl sitting alone, and see her head is bent down with one hand nearly covering her eyes. Still we pass this off and continue chatting away. Then we hear it again, a definite, short, brief pathetic sigh of grief. We look at each other, thinking: ‘what the heck is this’, then without any words: ‘what should we do’? Our first thought was: ‘this isn’t our problem. Why isn’t anybody else handling this’? But the sobbing continues, a little louder, and now, unable to ignore her, see that she’s crying and her hand on her face is there trying to cover up the tears.
This scene was too pathetic for me to ignore. As I mentioned earlier in this narrative, I can’t ignore the human condition in plight, no matter what the circumstances. I tap on Tom’s arm and we walk over to her and say: ‘what’s the matter? Why are you crying? Can we help’?
She gazes up at us with the faintest smile and then sadly explains; ‘I’ve just been ditched. My boyfriend from Maryland drove off this morning back to San Juan after a fight at breakfast and left me. I walked here from the Tamboo where we were staying. I don’t know anyone here. I only have a few dollars and nowhere to stay, not enough for a room. He won’t be back home till tomorrow so I can’t call him’.
She was, blond, cute, petite, skinny to a fault, probably weighing less than ninety pounds, but staring up at us with big teary eyes, like a lost puppy. She was dressed in a white sweater, way out of place for this clime. But then she wore tropical shorts, Hawaiian style, and sandals, and had a small valise at her side, colorful as her shorts, a strange sight.
We wondered out loud what type of man could have ditched her this way. She said he was her boyfriend from Maryland, a large man, half Indian, sometimes with a violent temper. They’d lived together for two years in a trailer and he supported her.
They flew in on a spree, spent a night in San Juan, then drove here in a rental. It was supposed to be like a honeymoon, their first vacation anywhere since they’d met and it was supposed to last a week. They had an argument the night before at the Tamboo motel on Sandy beach. He’d called his boss to check in and was told he was needed back right away.
They got into a bigger argument this morning at breakfast. She wanted to stay. He didn’t want to lose his job. He was the right hand man at a tire store. She told him he was always being used, and with that insult he got up, threw her a twenty dollar bill and told her she could stay but was on her own. She had her plane ticket and could fly back in a week. Then he drove off in the rental, back to San Juan.
This both amused and bothered me. How could people wreck a relationship over a single fight, so abruptly. It defied reason. There must have been much more to the picture she wasn’t telling us, perhaps years of bickering and disputes, and this final, long promised vacation, when broken, was the last straw. She threw down her ultimatum and lost.
Then an odd thought occurred to me. Why do people come from so many places, from all over the States to dump their girls in Rincon? I thought of all of Irving’s many waifs. Was this some renowned terminal for ditching your partner. I thought of Mike and Rachael, Becky and Bill, April and Corky, then Sanita and me, and finally, Jaime and Cindy. Tony and his wife were divorced a few years later, right down the street, the house suddenly empty one day, after such an expensive wedding. Victor and Gina, (an American) divorced, not in Rincon, but just months after they left for San Juan, having lived here for six years, raising their daughter. I might even include Manny and Sass, as she was Japanese, a foreigner like the rest of us.
Miami Dave and his beautiful wife were parted, not by divorce but death, as she died of cancer at twenty eight, in Rincon, where he stayed on like a ghost, forever lamenting her loss. I met her when I first arrived on the island, a tall, gorgeous girl in her bikini, with no signs of illness. Dave stood right beside her, both over six foot tall, tanned and muscular from swimming everyday, looking like the loveliest couple on Earth.
When I went back to sell my property in two thousand and four and went first to the Calypso, I found him there at the bar. I sat with him and after a little talk of old times and friends, he began crying in his beer, still in an emotional shambles over her loss, a decade past. It was not a happy place for young American couples. It seemed jinxed. Maybe we didn’t belong here.
That day our thoughts focused on the present. We asked her name, she said ‘Kim’ and we told her we would help. She looked doubtful at first, probably assuming the probable, that we were inviting her to one of our beds. We saw this and told her ‘no’, we’d get her a room. She stood up and wiped the tears from her eyes, faintly smiling.
We walked her up the hill to Tom’s motel and I talked the owner into giving her the room next to his for two nights for forty dollars, which I promptly paid. At least she’d have a place to sleep in privacy, every woman’s first concern. She saw the room, loved it and parked her little satchel there, right on the bed, ready to go out with us on the town now that she had a key in her pocket and her own safety zone. I also mentioned the sweater was out of place. She closed her door and came out a second later in a halter top.
I never realized before how much this means to a woman, her own safe haven, as if everyday is an excursion into a dangerous world and you need a retreat if something goes wrong. I don’t know if this is true of every woman, but in her case I saw the insecurity instantly evaporate once she had the key. Her whole mood changed from sad to happy, suggesting frightening scenes must have ranged in her imagination as we walked up, maybe because she was so slight and frail, like in Robert Burns’ poem “to a mouse”:
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Whatever it was, this swing from solitary weeping to bright smiles affected me like a cupid’s arrow, (the pity factor once again). Tom too was taken by the sudden change and glad she’d be spending the next few days in the room right next to his.
That evening we took her to dinner at the Black Eagle, a fine restaurant so close to the beach the water lapped up under the wooden deck and tables. She loved it and our attentions. We told her in the next few days we would settle everything. If she couldn’t go home we’d find her work and a place here. We both saw, over dinner, she was much more intrigued by that possibility than the other. She smiled frequently at Tom. I thought they might soon be sharing a room and liked that idea, myself the matchmaker.
He’d been a bachelor for so many years he deserved a change. But that didn’t happen. He never made any move, reminding me of Joel and his lost chance with Sanita. But I turned out to be just as indecisive and frozen as he was, just as I was the year before with Rachael.
I had a dozen chances with Kim over the next four months, as we worked together each day, played with Willy some weekends, had long, intimate talks and dinners, and a few unexpected turns of events, so romantic in every way they begged a move from me, her lips puckered, inches away, and our beds not ten feet apart. Any outside observer seeing these scenes would consider me the greatest fool on earth.
Tom left Rincon a month later to fly back home, with work dried up and his money spent. She stayed on another four months, soon working with me most weekdays at an exciting new career, earning her keep, meeting the natives, (our work crews) foreign to her but always pleasant and polite, and on weekends the Americans, the surfer scene, the colorful life of Rincon.
It was a rich adventure for her, first time away from home. She made several good friends and a host of new acquaintances, with weekends to stroll along the coves and beaches, only a short walk from her pad. It was a traveler’s paradise. She earned her four month stay all on her own, working for me and was extremely happy, with only one disappointment, me, that I didn’t make it last much longer with a proposal.
But she also saw the fix I was in with Sanita, and her timing was unlucky. She left when I was at my lowest ebb financially and emotionally, just a few weeks before I saw that Sanita had absconded with Mark and my son for good, already fearing it with weeks of no telephone calls. That changed everything for me and I would have begged for her help and partnership then, to help recover him. But she was a thousand miles away. It was another love “manqué”, by a hair. It seems to be my fate to be the bachelor.
If you knew the story of ‘Palinurus’, that’s mine too.
The next day, Sunday, I picked them up and gave them a tour of Rincon and then to Sandy beach for a walk, where I ran into my friend R.S. He told me he was leaving for the States for a month, Florida, to visit his daughter. I asked if this girl could stay and watch his pad above Sandy beach while he was away. He instantly agreed, saying he’d be happy to have such a cutie keep his bed warm while gone.
We walked up to his place, messy with unmade bed and clothes on the floor, dirty dishes on the counter, which he said he’d clean before tomorrow, but it was a great place to call home, a wooden A-frame house right above one of the nicest beaches around, the all-American surfer beach, the Tamboo just down the steep hill, with its deck and bands playing there on weekends, young Americans surfing everyday along the half-mile strand, coconut trees, a demi-paradise of postcard beauty and all her’s for free. She thanked R.S. with a hug, then turned to me with the largest smile. This was before I even thought of offering her a job. But that smile got me thinking.
Things were working out perfectly for her with our help. We moved her in on Monday morning just as R.S. was leaving and handed her the keys. But she’d need money for food. I had the store in Moca so I told her I’d drive her there every day and pay her seven dollars an hour for her help. Tom still had two weeks of work at my house and seemed charmed with Sanita’s daily visits. He was the nicest guy in the world, considerate and kind to a fault, undemanding of anything. But she didn’t take to him.
In size and looks, in personality, he was much like me. Perhaps that was her reason. She was looking for the opposite and soon found it.
