• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 912 0

But it was certainly expensive. We were trying, uncharacteristically, to be fiscally prudent. I had invested the money I’d saved from my time at the World Bank, and being a savvy investor, I had put most of it in tech stocks. I had one year, one last year, to write a book that someone would buy, and in the meantime, we planned to live off Sylvia’s salary. Eventually, we swallowed hard and moved into a small bungalow that offered a sweeping view of Vila Harbor. Of course, between the house and the view there stood a three-story apartment building. We couldn’t afford the million-dollar view, but if we stood on chairs, which we did daily, we’d just manage to see the waters of Mele Bay and the verdant hillsides that stretched toward Devil’s Point. It was a modest house, nicely furnished, with the notable exception of the bed, which had a mattress that looked as if it had been the scene of a horrifically bloody crime in a brothel. We turned it over and concluded that there had been at least two crimes committed on it.

“Do you think six sheets are enough?” Sylvia wondered. She had divested a Chinese shop of its stock of sheets, and if one looked closely, one could see the overlapping contours of a Buddhist temple, a wooden bridge spanning a waterfall, a panda grazing on bamboo shoots, a pagoda, and a strutting peacock, a jumble of Chinese shadows.

Once moved in, we soon settled into our routines. Sylvia managed a few development projects for FSPI, which now and then took her far and wide around the region. Whereas in Kiribati she had dealt with excrement and disease, now she found herself involved with coral-reef restoration and promoting good governance. I worked at my book, and when I managed to reach my daily word count, I’d catch a minibus into town and spend the late afternoon walking around, idly wondering when I might feel at home here. Typically, whenever I move someplace new, which I have often enough, it takes me no time at all before I feel as if I am somehow a part of the world around me. Even when I had no desire to be a part of that world, as periodically happened in Kiribati, the circumstances of place, the peculiarities of geography, ensured that, like it or not, this was home. Port Vila, however, simply felt strange to me, and with each passing week, the town felt odder still. I’d find myself at the Rossi Restaurant, next door to the lingerie shop, sipping an espresso, idly perusing a faded Paris Match or Le Figaro, listening to the perfumed Frenchwomen planning a dinner party and the men discussing Marseille’s prospects in the French soccer league, and I’d think, okay, this is where the French people hang out. Now and then, I’d meet Sylvia for a drink after work at the Office Pub, where we’d watch with mouths agape as the other customers, middle-aged Australian men, downed their stubbies while watching the footy on the telly and hurled the most startlingly colorful invectives at the cowering barmaids, whom they referred to as “darkies.” All right, we thought, it appears that Australia has rednecks too, and this is where they gather. Some weekends, we’d find ourselves at Le Meridien resort, at the far end of Erakor Lagoon, where we’d rent a catamaran and sail the length of the lagoon, about two miles, and just as we’d near Erakor Village, a community off the electricity grid, a powerboat would be sent for us. “Shall I tow you back?” asked the resort employee. “No, it’s all right,” I’d explain. “I can sail, and the wind is fine, won’t even require any tacking.” But he’d be politely insistent, and I’d politely decline the rope, not because I was rude, but because I was prideful, and we’d compromise and I’d tack, turn the boat around, let out the sail, and glide under escort away from the men fishing in their wooden outrigger canoes and back toward the French teenagers waterskiing behind speedboats until we were safely docked at the resort, a gilded enclave lavishly decorated with the artwork of Vila’s most prominent local artist, a gay Russian émigré. At dinner parties hosted by those employed to do good in Vanuatu,