Declan met Delighting at a dance, on the small tropical island where they lived. That is how he always remembers the story, and the way he still likes to tell it, forty years later. She was the junior head girl at the All-Girls school. This was back in the days when Declan was just figuring out that he was a poet: when he spent his days cutting class at the nearby boys’ high school, where he was in his last year; days he spent drinking coffee at the provisional shanty-teastall outside the wrought iron gate of the All-Girls school. His buddies at the teastall were old men whose wives had barred them from drinking rum, or who drank tea for their health. Most of Declan’s rough and tumble schoolmates — in unbuttoned polyester shirts, cocked collars and poses of nonchalant lounging — preferred the rumbars and smokeholes a bike ride from their school. They didn’t understand why Declan preferred the teastall. What de scene dare? they asked. It dirty.

It not dirty, Declan replied on cue. It only look dirty.

He liked the downbeat lojinks of the teastall, with its corrugated roof that housed only the crosslegged proprietor, and the single makeshift table on the ground and the three collapsible stools around the table. Declan liked the teastall, and then there was the steady stream of readymade muses at the All-Girls school.

With one foot on a stool, pen in dextrous hand (connected to an elbow resting on the knee of the propped, posed leg), and a cup of coffee in the other hand, Declan Boylan was: Still Life with Poet, Lurking. In those days, the air was humid with talk of revolutions, spooks, client states, race and riots. Mulatto Declan — of half-Irish, half-Caribbean descent — mainly listened, and kept an eye out for the girls. Sometimes he would catch the students just before the eight o’clock bell, but more often he saw them when school broke at three. Declan watched the precious All-Girls girls being dropped off and picked up by their parents. One or two of the older ones knew Declan via other avenues, but they did not speak to him while they were at school. He didn’t know Delighting back then, when she was just a pretty face in a crowd of pretty faces.

One afternoon shortly before three, certain tropical clouds amassed overhead. The piercing blue of the island’s sky, almost chemical in its saturation, started to fade and grade into grey. The clouds grew staticky and clotted, and within two minutes a few fat drops of rain had artfully tinged Mr Declan Boylan’s new poem, lying on the teastall bench, with tearbursts. He nodded, a pleased poet. Every few seconds, an increasingly slender raindrop divebombed his cup of coffee. As the other three customers left, looking for cover, Boylan started to swirl the tepid coffee, and to study his swirling, and to wonder how long he should wait before thinking about deciding on what to do next. The sand that the proprietor had strewn about the teastand, to keep the dust from rising, stippled and turned muddy. The sun seemed to take the rest of the day off; the afternoon said: clearance sale, going out of business.

The patter of rain on the corrugated roof picked up, and each raindrop hit the teastall’s one remaining customer like a bullet, mainly around his temples, but then soothed the skin with a warm plashy kiss which ran down his sideburns and dripped off his jaw. Declan folded his latest verse manuscript, now timelessly blotched, and put it away, then turned his cinegenic profile to the sky. The wind got busy etching hollow noses on the raindrops so that, surreptitious, they would first burst on the skin and only then sting. The tops of trees were avidly reading vibrations in the airwaves and from the lightning that branched across the sky. Men’s voices were raised, the All-Girls three o’clock bell rang, and thundering typhoons lashed down in slivers and splinters of rain on the little island in the Caribbean.

Declan, now a wet loiterer outside the school gates, sauntered indoors for cover. A girl, in her grey pleated skirt, white blouse and monogrammed prefect’s badge, was lining up the younger girls whose parents had not yet arrived. She saw him wiping his sleek head with a sopping square of something, call it silk. In those days, before the inevitability of male pattern baldness had caught up with him, Declan wore the long soft locks of a sensitive soul. Under her gaze, Declan mopped his head suavely, but when she wasn’t looking he reamed out his watery ears, pinched his nostrils, bulged his eyes and blinked. The lightning, as they say, flashed, and Declan hawked expertly to clear something in his head. His ears popped just then, just as she caught his eye again, and they looked at each other for a flash-photographic moment until the pressure equalized in his head, and she smiled at him.

Let’s say your life is a dark pool: Declan Boylan, decades later. He is a wised-up mark these days, at sixty. Suppose that the waters are dark until waves ripple the surface of the pool. Now suppose those ripples glint like filmstrips, flashing images and evoking voices. Suppose furthermore that events — first kiss, first time, first vows, first child, next child, death of a parent, adultery, new job, more adultery, death of remaining parent, last time, final kiss, last touch, final loneliness — events are dropped, plopped, into the pool of your life. (The pool of the memory of your life: Boylan being specific). Events drop such that each one ripples the surface, makes waves through time and memory, and the waves periodically lap onto the sands of your consciousness. The sands, Mr Boylan decides. Past events are always lapping at the sands of your present consciousness. We can say that some — big, flapping — events make waves that lap frequently. Other ripples come by once in a blue, but nevertheless periodic, moon. It is the size of the event, its shape and dimension and its momentum, that — Boylan struggled to finish the thought — that determine the nature of the waves the event makes on your life. Some events, dense, hydrodynamic, sink quickly and hardly make a splash, but then boomerang back on you in the mixed metaphors of your nightmares. Other events, hooked fish and harpooned whales, thrash and make a commotion and a fuss, and become part of your story, the story you chat about with all sorts of people.

On a darkened, stormy afternoon, a slim Indian girl smiled at Declan while he took shelter under the driveway portico of her school. Around them, the falling rain slowed and glided to the ground while the opening tinkling strains of `Riders On The Storm’ pitter-pattered in Declan’s head. Meanwhile, she lined up the younger girls and did other important junior head girl things. The storm cleared in a few minutes, and the sun apologized, beaming down on a new world. Declan left the All-Girls school, passed the shanty-teastall and headed home. There he set the new, rainsplashed poem to music, then set about writing more poems, all dedicated to the girl with whom he believed he had shared a moment and whose name he still did not know. Over the remaining course of his final high school year, our Mr Boylan wrote one hundred poems, of which twenty were set to music. He continued to lark about at the teastall, but never once tried to speak to the girl he had his eye on, though he saw her two or three times a week. He was satisfied — in fact, he preferred — not knowing her, or her name. In his poems, she was You, or Ambrosia, or Amritsar — this last a concession to her ethnicity — a constantly deferred, anonymous muse.

For Declan, seeing You one ear-popping, gibbous-eyed, suddenly stormy afternoon — like the sun’s foreclosure, a bankruptcy of the day — was the second kind of splash.

A month after his fatidic afternoon downpour, which marked the beginning of the rainy season, eighteen-year-old Declan graduated from high school. When the speeches were over and the diplomas safely stowed away, there was a fashion show organized by, and starring, the graduating class of the All-Girls school. Students and parents from both institutions were filed and ranked on benches and on chairs outdoors, in the football field of Declan’s school, for maximum seating and minimum comfort. The boys whistled and whooped in the migraine-bright afternoon as the models came strutting out, one by one and in pairs, just like on television, just like in New York. Declan had eyes for only one girl. After half an hour of sashaying sarongs, a regiment of semi-mandarin collars, a staggered stage of pseudo-African headdresses, quasi-Indian kameezes worn over jeans, and the odd sari or two — the girls wrapped and sweating, trying not to trip over their hems and heels — the show ended. Declan stared at the program in his hand; the models’ names meant nothing to him, all he knew was that his girl, of the lightning cloudbursts and popping sinuses, was not one of the girls he had seen on stage. Then the loudspeakers announced the show’s organizer and designer, and she came out to take her bows, and it was her, and she wasn’t even graduating that year.

Declan pocketed the envelope his parents gave him as a graduation present, said he would be right back, and lurked outside the girls’ dressing rooms, waiting for her. He heard squeals and coos through the door — the girls were excited, the show had been a success, some were now considering modeling as a career: Miami Munich maybe Milan. Declan rehearsed what he wanted to say. Hey, that was a… Hi, congratu… Hello, rally good sh…? Will you be at the dance this eve? Yuh comin tonight?

The door opened and she entered.
— No men allowed back here, she said.
— That was a great show. Rally well done. Congratulations.
— Thanks. I know yuh, nuh?
— So I’m Declan, and I wondering if yuh coming to the dance tonight.
— Declan? I see you at the teastall, nuh?
— Yeh.
— Sure I coming tonight.
— O.
— …I’m Delighting.
— But that’s beautiful!?
— ? she said.
— ?
— I don’t have a date, nuh? she said.
— O. Well, then, I’ll see you there.
— If you say so.

She was not Delight, like a lost goddess, nor was she Delightful, a flower of bliss. She wasn’t Soma or Manna or Honey. She was Delighting, a gerund, expressing generalized or uncompleted action.

When he was older — during his Thirties, before he got himself married — Declan Boylan used to tell people that the happiest time in his life was that particular year he dated Delighting. Their romance was the stuff of legend, in Mr Boylan’s head. The clothes they wore that evening, during their first date, took on deeper shades of meaning: his deep purple silk shirt, unbuttoned and worn over a white T-shirt and black trousers, seemed to shimmer in sympathy with Delighting’s blue silk cheongsam, with its sleeveless shoulders and mandarin collar and column of buttons down the front. In Mr Boylan’s recollection, the evening’s boisterousness (young punks, rum) became a backdrop of pleasantly bracing tension. The broken punch bowl, the inexplicable clogging of the toilets, and the distraught hotel staff, all faded from his memory and became a mere susurration of real life, other people, leaving only the ballroom setting and Delighting.

Declan showed me curled photographs, yellowing and red-eyed, of prom night. Shiny faces, arms around shoulders, fists raised in mute solidarity with the revolution, knees bent in half-hearted mock can-cans. The men made leering faces, all bluster and joy, while the women were frozen in poses of huddled discussion or batting eyelashes. Makeup and perspiration, hair grease and drink. There was one particular photograph of Declan and Delighting that he treasured: he, fruitlessly tall, leaning with his head against a wall, looking down his nose, while his torso arched away, purple shirt hanging open, his legs rearranging themselves somewhere below the frame of the picture. She, arms crossed, barely up to his shoulders, looking away from the camera, her hazel eyes luminous from the reflecting silk she was wearing, bored, enigmatic. That night they kissed, and the following day became a couple.

Over that summer, Declan discovered that Delighting’s mother and father, the Roopnarines, were far stricter than his own biracial parents were. The Roopnarines were neurotic and overprotective, stressed by Delighting, because she was a girl approaching marriageable age who showed no interest in the boys who met their approval; and distressed by her brother Anand, five years younger, because he was a beloved son who demanded reverence but needed babying. Declan started to visit the Roopnarines in the evenings, twice a week. Mr Roopnarine, university professor, welcomed Declan with less iciness than his wife. `You know how your electric guitar does work?’ he asked Declan, while in the kitchen Delighting cajoled Mrs Roopnarine into serving soda in the good glasses. Declan did know, but politely shook his head. `It have a amplifier?’ Mr Roopnarine said. Pickup, sir? `Yes, the pickup is a magnet, it have a field, a magnetic field, and when the string wibrates, it picks up the wibrations in the magnetic field?’

Declan started several obscure jobs, but by the end of the summer he settled down to tending bar at a local club. Delighting returned to school for her final year, and during her school recesses, if prefecting and head-girl duties permitted, she would have a cup of coffee with Declan. The months passed.

Around Christmas, because their daughter had been accepted early decision into a good college in New York on a full scholarship, and because she would be leaving the following fall, and because of Declan’s polite persistence and patience, the Roopnarines permitted him to take Delighting to the movies. `What is the harm, wife?’ Mr Roopnarine said. `Cause,’ he sang, `she leaving on a jet plane, we don’t know when she be back again?’ Mrs Roopnarine, faced with her husband’s crooning, softened. But, she said, she would not let them see American movies together. `I saw that Lauren Bacall,’ Mrs Roopnarine said, remembering her one time twenty-odd years ago watching an American movie in a theater.

Declan took Delighting to the single drive-in on the island and watched Hindi movies with her on Friday evenings. `OK, so in this movie, three brothers are separated in childhood and raised by different fathers,’ Delighting said. `Amar is raised by a policeman, and he grows up Hindu. Akbar is brought up by a Muslim tailor. A Catholic priest looks after Anthony. All the actors playing these men are Hindu.’ During the movie, Declan placed an arm around her. `Look at this,’ Delighting said. `Amar is a fine, upstanding cop, he’s always in uniform. Akbar has a part-time career as a ghazal-singer, when he’s not tailoring, and he’s always in kurta-pajama and wears accessories, like that scarf around his wrist. Fine. And Anthony, he’s a good-for-nothing, a drinker, a layabout. But the thing is, Anthony always wears the best clothes… he’s in flared pants, or a tux and top hat, he even looks good in the altar-boy outfit.’

— You’re right, that’s rally wared, Declan said, placing a hand on Delighting’s thigh.

In the fall, two months before the Iranian hostage crisis began, Delighting enrolled at the Clausewitz Institute of Technology in New York, to study fashion. When she left their little dot on the map, our Mr Boylan went back to writing poetry at the teastand. His bartending job had led to more opportunities-he now played guitar with the club’s house band. He was prepared to wait for her, to see Delighting that Thanksgiving, if she visited, or Christmas, when she visited. In October, the mellowest month, he received a carefully worded letter detailing the problems with long-distance relationships, the juncture of their diverging lives (`at this juncture of our div?’ she wrote), new ambitions, other people (there was a motorcycle mechanic, and an out-of-work movie special effects `person’).
Declan Boylan moped. At home, he moped. When he played gigs, he moped on stage in front of tourists. At the teastand he wrote about moping. Some of this writing, through nighttime processes too complicated to explain, became poems of mope; other daytime efforts he called moperock lyrics. One of these was set to music. Some unclassifiable stuff resisted easy categorization and he sent it off to Delighting in ten easy installments over as many days.
He decided to pursue her, and made arrangements to holiday with her on Florida’s isthmus-midway between the Caribbean and New York-for a week. Declan told his parents he wanted to see the music scene and make some contacts in Miami. He bought himself a ticket with his remaining graduation money (carefully folded and hidden inside his expensive guitar where no one would ever find it) and flew out to meet Delighting, feeling grateful, touched and honoured that she was devoting Thanksgiving, her first in America, to him. Mr Declan Boylan brushed aside Delighting’s gruff excuses (she didn’t have enough money to go home, nor any family in New York, so she thought next-best-thing?) and saw through to the truth: that she missed him and wanted him to take her back.
It was, contrary to eternally springing hope, a week of hotel rooms, diners, and friendly unloving. There was no making up: none of the take-her-back kind, none of the it’s-been-too-long-kind, none of the so-what-do-you-want-to-do kind. Delighting was distracted and she insistently spoke of New York with fresh rapture: she loved her classes, hated her peers, and had heard that William Burroughs was leaving the Bowery to move to Kansas… The motorcycle mechanic was out of the picture (in a fit of rage he had broken her window and lacerated his fist); the special effects `person’ was now `Alex-my-roommate’. And there was a newer someone or other. Declan went home. His parents asked, and he told them about his vacation (`The music industry’s rally wared in America,’ he extemporized; and `She fine, she a little vex,’ he said).
Some time later, while writing a bright, brittle thing about moping, our Mr Boylan hit upon a new idea. He finished off the poem, and then convinced his fairly liberal, island-bound parents that he needed to study in America. `Sound engineering,’ he told his father. `That what I’ll study.’ The Boylans, pleased to see their son pursuing a vocation, agreed to pay for part of his education.
He saved up. He tended bar, played gigs in various chutney-soca clubs, and he hosted poetry readings. He used the tips from this last to pay for coffee, which kept him awake at night in order to write new poems that he read out at the next reading. He managed to get one year’s tuition and New York rent together-when he got there, he figured, he would sort out the following year’s expenses. In the spring, he went to the Wry Technical Institute to learn how to become a sound engineer, but he secretly hoped to become a poet and/or rockstar.
He understood, and gave others to understand, that he was there simply to attend Wry Tech, and to make music. Delighting just happened to be in the same city.

For all their galoomphing about, men reserve the right to die before their wives: although these days Declan’s brown eyes are starting to fade and cloud with age, he feels that he is starting to see things-his own life-more clearly. Women deserve to live longer, he thinks, if you can call it deserve, if you can call it living. No parent should outlive their child, and no husband his wife. But Declan had not been so fortunate.
Summer, Declan’s wife, used to say that she would understand if he left her for Delighting. Strange woman, Summer. Her parents were American mid-life hippies who had settled on the northern atoll of Declan and Delighting’s binary island-nation. During the post-war oil boom, Summer’s parents were part of the international flotsam that washed up on the island. Mr and Mrs Blaze lived and laughed and went hippy in the Sixties, soon after Summer was born. They considered other names for her, their firstborn: Gloria, Crystal, Autumn. They considered April, May and June, but settled on Summer and hoped that her baby blonde hair would not darken as she grew older-the thought of having a brunette daughter named Summer Blaze filled them, especially Mrs Blaze, with an unnamable, non-specific dread.
In the diminuendo days of the oil the island’s streets and dirt roads were haunted by rusting hulks of boats that passed for automobiles, great big American cars that had been purchased during headier, wealthier times, but which were now too expensive to service regularly. Many of the foreigners left the country, but the Blaze family stayed on and moved to the northern island. Tourism was replacing oil as the country’s leading industry, and the Blazes worked first as bartenders, then as hoteliers at a local resort for American tourists and servicemen. These visitors and transients came for the limpid blue Caribbean water of the northern island, and were ferried up on `glass boats’ through which they marveled at and photographed the friendly marine life. The flower-power Blazes welcomed these vacationers, smoked ganja with them up front and center, and sold it on the side to stick it to the man. Although Summer was not directly addled by her parents or their pot, all three had a lasting influence on her-a complaisance or an ease in her manner and outlook.

Miss Summer Blaze met Mr Declan Boylan in New York, where she was working as an assistant editor at TeenMag, an influential rag for nascent fag hags. One day in the spring of Reagan’s first year as president, before reality shows and everyday personal computers, Summer was sent on a mission: to find eligible young people in Manhattan who were willing to participate in TeenMag’s blind date experiment. Summer walked around the West Village, casting keen looks at the people around her. She signed up a girl from New Zealand, a tourist in town for another two weeks. Now she needed to find a guy with whom to pair off the New Zealander, and see, there was one, lanky, long-haired, crouched on his haunches, poking a wary finger at an old typewriter for sale on a Sixth Avenue sidewalk.
Declan had, in fact, just arrived in New York three weeks ago. He had stayed with Delighting for the first week. Some questions were resolved during that time: he discovered that `Alex-my-roommate’ was male. And with her classes and his apartment hunting, he barely spoke three words to the girl he realized with a shock was now his ex. Still, during that first week in the City, Declan had wrangled an apartment, a spacious two-bedroom on Mercer Street with two other men-sublet from a New Wye U professor of Women’s Studies who was on sabbatical for a year. He was to begin classes at his uptown vocational school in a week.
Since Boylan was considering thinking about deciding to become a professional poet, he figured he needed a typewriter. There were perfectly preserved old Smith-Coronas from the Forties and Fifties in the antique stores in the Village, in beige bodies with green keys, or aquamarine on sky blue. Boylan could not afford these older art deco typewriters, and at any rate as a poet he felt he needed a beat-up black bug, all sticky keys and undulating, meandering type. There were more recent, but ragged Underwoods for sale in the flea markets and on the streets. He was inspecting one such machine on Sixth Ave when he heard a voice behind him.
-Scuse me hi.
-…?
-Hi, my name is Summer, she said handing him her business card, and I work for TeenMag, and we’re doing.
-Summer? But dat beautiful.
-Thanks. So we’re doing an article on blind dates, and we’re looking for people to go on blind dates, and then tell us about how the blind dates went. What’s your name?
Introductions were made. Summer asked him where he was from, and Declan told her.
-I knew it, she said. I grew up there!
-Nah! Dat rally wared, Declan said. To meet someone from back home, here. How could you tell where I was from?
-From your accent, boy, you does talk de talk, how me eh go notice? Summer turned on her own Caribbean patois.
She told him a little about her job, and the article she was working on, and then asked Declan if he would like to go on a blind date. Declan, new in Manhattan, alone with two roommates who had grown up in Brooklyn and had been friends for years, accepted Summer’s offer. Here was a girl of established charm and good looks offering to send him on a date with some other girl, potentially also pretty, charming and available; and then Summer, the first girl with the beautiful name, wanted to have him come back and tell her about the date with the second girl. Declan accepted.
He bought the battered typewriter, then rushed to his apartment and called Delighting to tell her about his upcoming blind date.

Continue to Part II