the oddest couple « Letters from Grenada

the oddest couple

I met Nick first. He was Canadian, from Toronto. Maybe he was 50, but he could have been younger. It’s hard to gauge the age of the white-haired. He walked around the yard with his shoulders titled slightly back, as if he were getting ready for his turn under the limbo stick.

He was cute. My mother and I agreed on this point, which was awkward and made me glad neither of us was single.

Strictly speaking he had been hired as an electrician, but he was also a mechanic and a rigger. He lived on his boat, alone, and sailed from island to island. Unfettered. He was younger than most of the yachtie retirees. He was different from them in other ways, too. He hadn’t come to the Caribbean to enjoy his sunset years, but rather to escape the suffocating rat race up North.

Bean’s father liked to say Nick and I came from the same place. No, baby, I explained to him. Canada’s not the United States.

Whatever, he said. Both allyuh from up de road. Which was true. We were both in full possession of our dipthongs.

Isabella was from Colombia and – to borrow a phrase from Virgil – spent her days wandering around aimlessly yet with great effort, like a deer with an arrow stuck in her flank. She was wounded, grieving. Later she told me why. She told me that her brother had been murdered in Bogota, something to do with drugs. He had been her only sibling and she was heartbroken.

I don’t know how Isabella and Nick got together. One night I noticed the two of them sitting, heads close, in a corner of the beach bar. He had his foot on the bench of one of the picnic tables. His head was raised and his shoulders were loose, and he laughed as be brought his bottle of beer to his mouth. I’d never heard him laugh before.

Nick’s Spanish was terrible, the remnants of what he’d learned in high school, and her English was slightly worse. But they were both utterly unembarrassed by their clumsy verbalizations. Their language barrier did not impede their communication, but rather enhanced it. They listened hard and they spoke with their bodies and faces as well as their mouths.

I envied them. They were the oddest couple, sure, but they were also deliriously happy together, like puzzle pieces who’d been lost to each other for lifetimes. Whenever Isabella said Nick’s name, she blushed a little bit. I found her joy contagious. It filled my heart.