I didn’t see the girl until the end of my run—until well after I started, actually. Her figure appeared in the spaces between the palm trees, as she was also running, on a humid January morning, in this town called Cabarete on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.
To be honest, I didn’t see her fully, truly, until the very end. And I am assuming I ever really saw her at all.
The run started downhill from my rented condo, in the still-dark morning, along the coast road, back to the gravel track my taxi driver had spun his wheels on three days before. The coast, with its palms and sand and above all its surf, stretched out three hundred yards away from the gravel, now crunching underfoot. The name for those sands is Playa Encuentro: Meeting Beach.
Past the clutch of cafés and shops and the signs for the small hotels walked early risers, including Haitians, who came for the menial work and the wages only slightly less menial than those they could expect in Haiti, across the border.
Occasionally, a four-wheel-drive passed, sloshing the puddles, drawing belches from the red mud. These vehicles were usually filled with lighter-skinned surfers on their way to a sunrise session.
We moved along the gravel road, toward the coast, for the rush or for respite or for work. In any case, we were seekers, brought here as one. Each had his own desire.
I thought of my wife. She and I used to run together. What would she make of this place? Would we be able, even, to talk about it, without arguing? It was a bracing thought, and it fit the semi-darkness precisely, uncannily, such that I shivered at the realisation. I could forgive her the adulteries, even now. Even if she, for her part, had borne no interest, these final months. Even if the marriage felt already dead.
At the bend of the road, where the way forked in two, the left path went to the beach, and the right path went to the café. I turned left. A Haitian emerged from a building site holding a bottle of water, a foamy toothbrush in his mouth. He spat in the ditch. The man lived where he worked. Past him, a pair of cocks strutted on the broken pavement, green and black feathers pulsing like shocks of grass in the wind. Horses stood, silent, in the melting darkness; one, a stallion, had escaped his small pasture and stood in the road, inert like the others. He didn’t know he was free. I jogged, in a steady sheen of sweat, through the farm scene, past the cocks and the horses and the tropical woods. The road grew lighter with the dawn as I neared the beach.
There were some twenty people in the water. The older ones seemed young still: they looked about my age, I thought. Some surfed for real, over the six-footers, and left behind them a wake like cut denim when it frays a different colour. Others bobbed in the water before swimming out—before committing, in other words. One woman sat inert on her board, legs over either side. She did a kind of Buddhist prayer pose: palms together, fingers pointing upward, elbows out. She faced the coming sun, but her eyes were closed.
I stepped onto the beach, neglecting my workout and the accumulating sand in my sneakers. I turned behind me to see another young woman, with glorious dark hair and pale skin in the Gallo-Roman vein, sitting on the beach, stretching, peering out to the water, looking past me. I was invisible. Or at least, I felt that way.
Then the sun broke. Its first blood-orange rays set a crackling mirage on the horizon line. The beach tilted slightly northwest-to-southeast, as if to accommodate sunrises like this, or their observers. The roaring ball drifted higher, in tiny invisible progress, every slow-motion moment that I stood there, struck dumb by the scene. Two hundred yards to the right stretched a palm tree, growing horizontal and curving, like a postmodern cliché of a palm tree—an exaggeration, even better than the real thing—as if conceived for a postcard or a rum advertisement. The sun lit it up from the back, in blinding black silhouette, a coal-dark tree against a quivering crimson sun. In the foreground lay a black pumice outcropping, as sharp and unworn as if cooled from volcanic expulsion into hardness the day before. The stone jutted also into the new light, the rock rough and black and excellent. It looked like a prehistoric scene: a Jurassic Caribbean idyll.
Nearby, under the high palms and lower rhododendrons, a handful of Dominican women stood at intervals and swept the sand, putting light grooves across the gritty palm-forest floor. I did not know why they swept everything, covering even where the surfers did not walk. That part did not make sense to me: the doing, and the devotion, tied to a particular humble task. I hardly understood what these women—or, for that matter, the women I actually know—were doing or did or do.
I turned then, in the warming light that moved from deep orange and lighter orange to butter-yellow, to see the girl. She wore a white tank top, her hair’s natural white-corn blonde, and high orange shorts. She had light eyebrows and thin Scandinavian lips and an understated bosom to kill a man. She looked about twenty. It seemed she had run as far as the end of the road, as it parallels the beach, turned around, and was now heading back around the bend by the horses, where the café stood for the day’s later commerce. She passed beyond the trees, appearing as on old film stock in fixed, frame-by-frame images, which only suggests motion when played above a certain speed.
Her stride was enthusiastic. She seemed an experienced runner. I fell in behind her, without thinking about it, my body acting on its own, at a remove of about sixty yards. She traversed the long depression in the road where the lone free horse had stood, and soon after, she passed the stretch of inclining broken asphalt where the cocks and the teeth-brushing Haitian had been. All life had disappeared from her way, as if to oblige her, like an existential courtesy. I laboured to keep pace and to keep a distance, though my legs brought me closer to her, very slowly, naturally. In spite of myself.
The final three hundred yards brought a stiff gradient and the need to push in earnest to the break—the flat of the intersection among the back roads leading to the condos and the little hotels and the café. The girl accelerated into the plateau, then turned into the grass, wheeling, hands on hips, chin tilted to the sky, to catch her breath.
I ran to the same spot, not too fast or too close. Here was a good place, a respectable distance, to end my run, but I can’t say I was thinking that then. The girl cast a tempered glance at me as I stopped and put one hand on a post under the café’s palapa roof.
“You run faster than I do,” I called out, which seemed better than a canned ‘Good morning.’
Her chuckle put a pang in my stomach.
“Not really,” she said, in accented English. Her nipples lay, almost imperceptibly, under the cotton of her white top. I said something about the beach, how beautiful the dawn had looked, and she agreed. She had watched almost every day the week before, she said.
And the conversation continued for a moment. The girl was shy, even while opening herself up to a stranger. She talked and shared minor, impersonal things about her visit to Cabarete, her life as a student back in Sweden, and how she was spending time here with her family.
My wife had likewise gone to be with her family, separating the two of us, probably for good. And I realised, as I spoke of irrelevant things with this young Swedish flame, how she reminded me so dearly of my wife, who is neither Swedish nor such a young adult, but whose beauty and interestingness surpassed even those of the bewitching stranger before me now. In this, I felt no hint of impurity—it was not conquest that I sought, and certainly not an adultery of my own. Rather, the feeling was something respectable, something masculine and primordial and even good. I felt a certain justness of purpose: pursuing this young runner, finding out about her, as I had once pursued, with equally honourable motives, my soon-to-be-ex-wife.
By then, the sun’s brightness had filled the hillside, on the flat perch of which the woman and I stood together. At the café, a woman opened a door from the inside. She stood ready for business.
Surprising both of us, I offered the runner a coffee and more conversation. In the same moment, as if by some unwilled compulsion, there showed in her eyes my irreversible mistake. The young woman recoiled, not physically but apparently enough. I had overplayed things. I had blown my lead.
She said something quickly about needing to rejoin her family back at her place.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The unguardedness of it—the intimacy—put in me something like fear, a familiar knot of hardness between men and women, the slimy, cold, well-known difficulties between a woman and myself.
“I need to leave,” she said, her eyes pleading to be understood. To be pardoned. My wife had used just those words before her own departure.
Smiling, I nodded my comprehension.
She turned and jogged the rest of the steep, short hill to the hotel at the top, where her family was perhaps waking up. Even her stride, her lovely, bright ankles pistoning in quick strokes up the incline, looked like those of my wife, when she and I used to run together.
I turned, before the girl moved out of sight, and faced downhill. The sun was glaring now. The humid heat and the sweat had evacuated my nervous energy somewhat. My skull no longer demanded, in the ugliness of a morning’s thoughts in times of grief, the answers to my million questions that all started with the word why.
Instead, I accepted the questions’ opacities at face value. That value was very close to nothing. The loneliness felt familiar, in the worst way, like a filthy habit of which you are ashamed, or a dormant but beckoning addiction. That’s how mourning my marriage was for me, anyway.
The Dominican sun had grown far too bright, too harsh, for the early day. Carrying my coffee, I went, still sweating, down the café stairs to the patio, to the empty floor and away from the lone faceless lady at the register.
I would not return to Encuentro Beach. The decision came to me abruptly, already formed.
I drank my coffee. I sat, eyes wide open, under the hot, painful clarity of the light from the now-dead Cabarete sunrise.
