I put my hand on her shoulder. “You do know Zack lied to me about that. We never really had to leave, or at least I didn’t. But I thought—”
Zack suddenly appeared beside me. “Fucking Yankees,” he said and grabbed a fresh can of beer from the refrigerator. “You filling in the details for ‘Dawn’?” he asked Carol.
“You tell me your story, Zack, and I’ll tell you mine,” I said.
He sat down at the table. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Sounds fair. Except I already know yours.”
“C’mon, Zack, be straight with me.” I sat across from him and gave him a hard stare. Carol stood behind me with a friendly hand on my shoulder. “How do you know my story?” I asked him.
“A guy I met knows you.”
“And who might that be?”
“Okay, babe, I’ll tell you everything,” he said. He had done very well in Accra buying and selling Ghanaian arts and antiquities. He’d bought himself a house, set up two galleries and a warehouse for selling work wholesale to galleries in the U.S. and Europe. A year ago he’d come across a private collection of very old gold and bronze masks and plaques and other artifacts from Benin owned by a retired British army colonel who had stayed on in Ghana after independence. The colonel had died, and his widow had asked Zack to sell the collection abroad. For his trouble he was to receive a third of the selling price. “This was a major collection, man. Museum-quality stuff. Off the scale. Probably worth two, two point five million at auction. But you’d have to show provenance, pay the auction house a fat commission, pay New York and federal taxes, all that. By the time I got my piece, it’d be a small piece. Besides,” he said, “I didn’t have an export license and couldn’t move the stuff out of the country myself without a Ghanaian partner, who’d probably want half of whatever I got. So I guess I had what you’d call a Maltese Falcon moment.”
He had painted over the gold and bronze artifacts — masks, wall hangings, statuary, and pendants — with gray, latex-based housepaint that could be removed without damaging the objects. He carried the objects to the States in his luggage and a beat-up cardboard box tied with heavy twine. Claiming that the lot was made up of cheap souvenirs not to be resold, he declared its value at six hundred dollars, and thought he’d made it, until the customs officer pulled out a pocketknife and scraped the paint off the chin of one of the gold masks. Zack’s family had refused to help him or even see him, and since all his property and cash were in Accra, he couldn’t raise bail and spent a month in jail in Charlestown awaiting trial. He had to accept a public defender and got sent to Plymouth for six months. “If I’d had a decent lawyer, I’d have gotten a suspended sentence.”
“If you hadn’t been greedy, you’d never have been arrested,” I said.
The doorbell rang, and Carol hurried off to meet the delivery man at the bottom of the stairs. “End of story,” Zack said. “It could’ve been worse. It was mostly white guys convicted of white-collar crimes, short-termers in for tax evasion, kiting checks, insurance fraud. Small fish, most of them. People were catching up on their reading and taking mail-order courses in art appreciation.”
“What about Carol?” I asked.
“What about her? She’s been great, man. My port in a storm. She came out to see me every week, when no one in my family would bother making the trip. When I got out, she picked me up and brought me here and said I could stay with her and Bettina till I got back on my feet. The rest is history, man.”
“You started sleeping together, I suppose.”
“First thing, man. You’re not jealous, are you?”
“A little. Yeah.”
Carol returned with the food and spread it out on the table, and the three of us ate and drank beer. After a few moments, I asked Zack again how he knew my story. I wasn’t convinced he did know it. When I left Accra I’d not told a soul where I was headed. I’d never written from Monrovia to him or any of his friends or mine and didn’t believe that anyone who knew me in Liberia also knew him.
“Actually, I figured you’d gone back to the States. A-mer-i-ka. But then I met an old friend of yours,” he said. “In Plymouth. One of the inmates. He claims to know you and your husband well. Very well.”
“Who? What’s his name?”
“Charlie. But he hates being called that. Charles is his name. I used to call him Chuck, just to piss him off.”
“Charles?”
“Charles Taylor,” he said. “Remember him? He got sent up about a month before I got out, so we weren’t exactly buddies. But I pegged him right away for an African, and I thought maybe he’s from Ghana. You can always tell an African black guy from an American black guy, even without hearing him. They walk differently. Turns out he’s Liberian. And turns out he knows your old man very well. And knows you pretty good, too. You ever sleep with him?”
“No! For Christ’s sake, Zack!”
“Too bad. He lied. African guys, man, they want you to think they’ve fucked every white woman they ever said hello to. Anyhow, he told me a whole lot of other stuff, which I assume is true. Stuff about you and your kids and all, and about your husband, Woodrow, who Charlie thinks dropped a dime on him so he’d get nailed by the feds when he got to JFK. True?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “More pathetic, actually.”
Carol said, “I think it’s great you have kids, Don. I bet you’re a terrific mother.”
“Not so terrific,” I said.
“You know, you are a damned attractive woman,” Zack said suddenly, as if it had just that second occurred to him. “You both are,” he continued. “Two incredible-looking women!”
I looked at Carol. He was right about her, at least. She smiled, as if agreeing with Zack — about me, anyhow. A cascade of memories washed over me, memories of Carol when we first found solace and simple pleasure in each other’s arms. In different ways, even though most of my injuries had been internal and self-inflicted, we’d both in a sense been battered women. She’d been victimized by men generally; I’d been victimized by ideology. In each other, we’d both for the first time found someone we could trust. More than anything else, simple tenderness and intimacy were what we wanted then. We were too weak and shaken to be alone, and too wounded and confused to be with another person. Especially with a man. I’d invalidated and tried to overthrow all the old forms of tenderness and intimacy between men and women — missionary-position sexual relations, monogamy, fidelity, state-recognized and — regulated marital roles and responsibilities, even childcare — and afterwards found myself with nothing to replace those forms. I’d deliberately set out to shatter in mere months a social structure that had taken fifty thousand years to harden. It was like jumping from a ship that was in no danger of sinking and finding myself alone in a tiny rowboat in the middle of the ocean.
I’d chosen to abandon that ship, but Carol had been tossed off hers. The captain and crew had left her on a desert island, a castaway. One night I rowed solemnly, hopelessly, to shore, and there we were, the two of us, marooned together. I figured her for a working girl right off, barely twenty, heavy eye makeup, miniskirt, and fishnet stockings — the whole uniform. She stood at the end of the bar nursing a drink made with grenadine, trying to look exotic and available for a reasonable price to the crowd of half-drunk construction workers and fishermen bonding beneath the TV screens and around the pool table. A blow job in the parking lot, a quickie in the men’s room with the door locked, or an hour in a motel out on Route 28—it’s all the same to her, I figured, merely a way, the only way available, to pay the rent and buy food for herself and her kid and maybe get high enough to ignore for another day the way she makes her living. Until, of course, the drugs turn on her, and the way she makes her living becomes the only way she can get the money to get high. I could see by her stoned gaze, her flattened, self-amused affect, that she was on the verge of that turnaround. In six months, I thought, she’ll be doing tricks strictly to get high.