I can’t dance to soca tonight. You
can tell right off that’s what they’re playing. All that thrust, thrust, thrust
-- synthesized drums and cowbells, like calypso screwed funk and they had a baby
Belafonte with dreadlocks and an electric bass. Except when this one croons, “Come,
Mister tally man, tally me banana,” you are pretty sure “tally” doesn’t mean
what you thought it meant.
It’s not dancing anyway. It is more
like shuffling aggressively while half-naked strangers try to grab your
breasts. Like the subway at rush hour, but with music, or at least steel drums.
Just to get out of that scrum takes
activating every major muscle group. It leaves you feeling like you spent the
evening careening from one minor traffic accident to the next. Unless I can sue
someone for damages when it’s over, I’m not interested.
Plus I’m not wearing the right
thing. Or I’m wearing too many things. Like a top and a bottom. What are there, thirty people over there? And I spot
maybe six bikini tops, two pairs of surf shorts, three flip-flops, and a
sailor’s hat for the lot. No, no I don’t mean you. You totally inhabit that
freshly-shipwrecked look. You got to have the pecs, though, and I must say, it
looks like you’ve been working on yours. If I could just press…wow. Yeah. In
this world, there are shirts and there are skins, and you my friend, are a
skin.
No, it’s still no. My dad would have
a fit. You’ve met him, right? Of course you have, when you work the bar. Florid
guy, face shaped like a loaf of bread that didn’t quite rise? He’s up in the
clubhouse now, drinking fifty-year-old Macallans and lecturing the room on how
everything went south after they let women and Negros into Augusta. He’s
positive Soca Night is Baker Island’s Waterloo. “I had to turn over ten years
of tax returns, get three personal references from seat holders on the NYSE,
and piss Harvard crimson in a gold-plated test tube to be able to rent one of
your exclusive villas,” he told Mr. Baker. “And now any tourist with ferry fare
and beer money can storm the shores?” Mr. Baker mumbled something about reef
preservation and water shortages and the expense of running a private island.
To which father replied: “I guess ‘private,’ sometimes means ‘of lowest rank.’”
He forbade me from coming.
You’re right. He did say the same
thing last year. And I did dance. Yes, I remember. Every moment. That’s why I’m
saying no now. I owe you an apology. For last year. I’d never heard music like that before.
Something about the way the drums beat and the sand crunched and the scent of
frangapani and diesel fuel drifted in off the bay. Something about the way the
trade winds dried the sweat on my bare skin and you held me from behind and your
tongue tickled my sunburned neck and your hands cupped my breasts and one
finger at a time pushed under my suit top and stroked my nipples. Something about
that led, on my part, to moaning and grinding and panting and some shudders of ecstasy
that were not only, most probably, arrhythmic, but also vulgar, and I am sure
distressing to you as an employee of Baker Island, pledged, no matter how
distasteful, to pleasure – I mean to provide a pleasurable stay for -- your
guests.
The sex after? Earthshaking. Life
changing. You know that. But, of course, also uncouth and forward of me. Which
is why I am drawing the line, this year, at dancing. In front of dancing. Big
ol’ line.
Could you hand me that walking stick
there? I think I need to stretch. I’m a little warm. It’s just a groin pull,
taking forever to heal. Another reason I’m not, whoops! Thanks for the arm up.
If it’s uncomfortable, you don’t have to hold it there. No, no, it’s good,
nice. Still warm, but that’s okay. I might lean in a little more, maybe put my
cheek here. God, you skin is smooth. Do you know you smell like sea salt and
cardamom? If you move you hand around my waist, right here, I could stand --
not dancing of course -- without the stick.
Kind of a funny story about how I
got hurt. Remember my fiancé, Malcolm? I told you about him. He was why I wasn’t
dancing – not intending to dance – last year. My mother gave us ten Arthur
Murray classes. I think so we could learn to waltz for the wedding. But Malcolm
decided he wanted to master disco instead. He and his groomsmen planned to do a
routine to “Dancing Queen” at the reception and become YouTube famous. I got
your letter the afternoon before our fourth class. You know, it took three
months to get to me. You wrote in it, “You’ll always be my soca queen.”
Malcolm accepted his ring back
without much fuss that same day, after I agreed to go ahead and pay for the
videographer to film him and his fantasy football buddies boogying to Abba.
Over 3.2 million hits so far. I’m happy for him. And the dance lessons were
transferable. I signed up for six weeks of soca, graduated top of my class. I pulled
the muscle at the closing ceremonies, gyrating a tad too joyously to Farmer
Nappy’s “Chippin’ (With Me Own Woman).”
So your soca queen is temporarily
sidelined. That’s the real reason I have to say no to dancing tonight. But to
your hand here? Yes. And here? Yes. To your mouth down here? Yes. To your
thighs against my thighs? To your heart beating into mine, to wavelets lapping
at our toes, to island moons silvering our naked backs. Yes, yes, forever yes.
