Pineapple and Cigarettes

‘Back again, eh?’ He’s addressing the sun. ‘Alright.’ He eases his face from the pillow, waiting to judge the ferocity of his hangover. Nothing. Stands up. Still no bells. No whistles. Through the blinds, so much sun. A little confusing, that he should feel so good. It somehow seems unfair. ‘Beautiful day for a hangover,’ he thinks, but without pleasure.

His aunt’s kitchen: morning light licking tiles of royal blue. Blue like the tiles of an Andalusian mosque. Against the blue wall above the white stovetop, copper pans wait. Beneath the window, a pineapple. A wasp knocks and buzzes against the glass. Through that window a dogwood, white blossoms pasted like paper cut-outs on the blue tile sky.

There is a newness about the air this morning—its taste and smell, the spring smell, reminds him of Thailand in the morning when the air is still cool. It is such a strong recollection that, for a moment, he forgets where he is. It’s seven a.m., he’s about to have some pineapple and maybe a cigarette before he gets in the shower. Soon he’ll be in the hammock, smoking and looking through the screen at the children passing as the sky turns blue. He’ll have buttered toast and milky tea with Isabelle. Pineapple and cigarettes with Helene.

He takes his aunt’s pineapple. He's taken so many things that this doesn't count. Blunt knife cracks the skin, works through wet, soft fruit until he holds the fronds like a scalp. ‘Sorry pal, had to be done.’ He sets the pineapple right side up and skins the half of it, chops that half off and dices it into inch-thick wedges. Inch-thick wedges, that was how Helene ate pineapple. He feels as if someone snuck up on him while he slept and yanked off the years like a blanket. Like the sun can see all his secrets. He dumps the wedges into a bowl, covers them in yogurt, sprinkles a spoon of brown sugar and eats them as he did in Spain, with Karla. Except standing up, and alone.

On the wood floor, a half circle of pineapple. The dense, inedible core. He bends to pick it up and a rush of blood buoys his head. Did he drop a wedge that morning? Probably. He’s cut so many pineapples. Hundreds of them, maybe, in different houses in different countries for different women. More often than not, he dropped a bit. So why should the whitish core on the wood now remind him of that day in particular? Maybe it is the hangover, the world coming through as a pastiche. Nothing goes together. Sun, pineapple, tequila breath. Someone he’d thought he loved. Memories of someone he’d never known.

His aunt’s kitchen, his kitchen in Thailand, Karla’s kitchen in Malaga. Time and place don’t much matter. Or are time and place the only things that matter? A vague memory of a book he may have read makes him scowl. It occurs to him that he might miss Helene. Another part of him thinks that’s probably not the case. ‘She’s probably been off drugs for a while now, too. She was a clever girl.’ A clever girl with a weak will. A lot like himself. He wonders if sometimes she wakes up in the sun and thinks of him and, if so, what that means.

There is still half a pineapple left. He shears away some of the sides, leaving three or four inches of skin on the back, which he lays along the length of his palm. Two flicks of the blade to cut out the core. He thinks of the fruit carts he used to frequent in Thailand. Queued up on the corner, the few phrases to explain his presence in that town, and to order fruit. Tuk-tuks, smoke and noise. Dragonfruits, purple and green and spiny, with insides like veined grapes. Durian, the fruit that smelled so bad it was banned on planes, that could kill you if you ate too much.

He cuts the half pineapple like a fruit cart guy. Two flicks for the core, then flicking the blade through the flesh, with the pronged skin to protect his palm. After a few practice cuts, he speeds up, cutting deeper. And faster. And faster. Then he stops. It’s too nice a day to be cutting off fingers. So he finishes on the cutting board, then in his cupped palm shears the wedges slowly from the skin. Inch-thick wedges, and one of his aunt’s cigarettes from the back of the freezer.

He sits in the garden, trying to remember. He’d gone to Thailand because he’d disgraced himself in Spain. There’d been other women, sun, things to smoke and drink which helped him to forget. There’d been Isabelle, more sun, toast and tea. It had been her house he’d lived in later with Helene. A little wooden house on stilts by a stream, a little house that he loved more than the women he’d been with there, because it had been a small and an easy thing.

Two cardinals in a tree. Two drops of red in the white. He wonders what that could mean. Then, ‘Bird-reading, eh?’ He lights the cigarette, the dry smoke, the wet, sweet, sour citrus. He wonders again if he misses Helene. He misses his hammock, his stream, watching the terrapins crawl in the mud. Wearing a sarong in the morning. The children who yelled “Good mor-ning, Tea-cher,” in broken chorus, forming each word separately, careful with their r’s. He missed the time he’d woken up to find her reading Proust in his hammock in her underwear. Was that love? Those seven seconds before she coughed up a bit of morning phlegm.

Once, they’d laid their hands together on her belly, and he’d felt a tremendous energy entering him through the hands. Love, or drugs?

He moves to stub out the cigarette, thinks better of it and trades off for pineapple, letting the ciggie burn in the mouth of a ceramic frog. ‘Pineapple and cigarettes. Why do you go so well together?’ It seems to him that there might be some kind of meaning there.

Yesterday had been the first sunny day of May, as well as a Friday. The whole city loosened its tie around four-ish, and margaritas had begun to flow by five. He’d gone to happy hour with a friend he’d known since kindergarten, a girl who knew what he’d done in Spain, the first person he’d told about the baby-to-be. They talked about friends from home, their new jobs, and after a few drinks they talked about their failed relationships. Then they ate paella, and he’d driven her home. From there he’d gone out to his married friends’ place. More margaritas, shots of Cuervo, a bar. No, two bars.

He gets up and goes to the back gate. The car parked neatly in the alley. ‘How do I keep doing that?’ He chastises himself, but without feeling. Smiles at the cigarette. ‘Still here, are we?’

“We’re French, for us it is like a handshake. Please understand,” was about what she’d said. Plus, “I don’t love him, I love you.” And a couple disparaging remarks about the guy who’d been his friend five minutes before, the guy she’d been shaking hands with a few days earlier.

‘Smoked like a chimney,’ he thinks, but the tense is unclear. It’s more important that he roll the ash carefully from the ember. He exhales and talks to the smoke as it dissipates. ‘We all dissipate, eh pal? No worries, right?’ Maybe Helene’d had a point. Why try to hold on?

“Because fuck that,” he’d answered then. It hadn’t helped that, even at the time, he’d been intensely aware of the fact that he’d given a nearly identical excuse to the girl in Spain. In the presence of all that karma and irony, it’d been hard to get angry. Jealousy helped. But hurt and anger and jealousy—what had they all meant? Shite, it would seem.

He switches to pineapple. “If you ever write a heroine,” she’d told him, and this during their first or second day together, “She has to like to fuck.” At the time he’d found that to be a compelling statement on avant-garde feminism. By the end, not so much. Still, no straight girl had ever said anything like that to him, not before or since. ‘Hey, the smoke spreads itself around, too,’ he figured. ‘We all dissipate.’

The reader in her underwear, who taught the children to mind their r’s and v’s. Doesn’t he have any memories that might mean something? The day he’d ended it they’d had their bags packed for a move. North, to the mountains, away from judgment and temptation. But by then he had learned that you don’t escape from your sins. You only take them on vacation. He’d broken it off and they’d sat on the wooden floor, unpacking, separating their clothes, and repacking into separate bags. What words had they used? At the time it had seemed to mean something. Taking her turquoise skirt out from between his T-shirts. He could remember thinking that he’d remember this scene in vivid detail for many years. Had she been crying? Probably. He closed his eyes, tried to remember or to invent. She’d been wearing his blue fisherman’s trousers. She might have stolen his phone.

What he remembered, what he could really see, was himself cutting pineapple. There’d been MDMA, nightswimming with the phosphorescent plankton that sparked to life when they made contact with skin, lighting entwined bodies like an out-of-season Christmas tree. Waking up scared, confused, and feeling far from home—but it is cutting the pineapple that he remembers. Cutting a pineapple, alone in a wood kitchen on the far side of the world. All the things he’d seen, before and since, all the places he’d been, the life changing experiences that changed his life completely for a week, cities he could recall a street at a time, but never all at once. The women he’d known and who had known him, all of the moments, beautiful and ugly, for some reason signify nothing in comparison to a sharp-skinned citrus fruit. ‘Two birds hopping in a tree, a couple pretty colors, blossoms tugged in the breeze drift slow to the ground,’ he’s thinking. By this point he’s doubled over with his arms folded in front of his stomach, and he feels something moving inside him. Whichever way it goes, it’s going to burn on the way out.

He leaves the frog to smoke in peace. Behind the chair he’s just left, four crows on a wire, black against the tile sky.