Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks

since that autumn day in 1962 in the sad young rabbi’s office, when we both came to be alone. In marrying each other we were, for different reasons, abandoning each other, both of us sentenced to unexpected solitude, she by virtue of the end of the long, ongoing drama of our romance, which until then had kept her such good company, and I by virtue of her relentless need to appropriate and objectify my subjective life, a direct consequence of her inability to perceive the autonomous existence, never mind the essence, of another person’s inner reality. It was as if I had been born and raised to cultivate this strange form of solitude and had deliberately sought out the one woman who could accommodate it in this unique and peculiar way.
    It was all too familiar to me, I said to Chase.
    She said, So you courted, married, betrayed, and abandoned your mother again. And Darlene again. What about your third marriage? she asked. What about Becky?
    She was different, I said. Or maybe she wasn’t. I had a lifelong habit of falling in love with women who needed me to solve their insoluble problems more than I needed them to solve mine. I needed to be seen as the fixer. Mr. Fixit.
    And now? With me?
    You’re the first woman I’ve loved who doesn’t need me more than I need you, I said.
    Thanks . . . I think, she added and smiled.
    Despite the pleasure we took from the calm and privacy of the Îsles des Saintes, our more persistent interests lay not with small, homogenous, figuratively gated communities like Marie Galante, but with the larger islands, where there were lively and unpredictable native populations, where the land could not be surveyed by a single glance from the air or a half-hour drive in a rented car, where classes, races, cultures, and languages mingled and strove against one another. Thus from Guadeloupe, moving on down the Windwards, we flew to Dominica, which was large, mountainous, crowded, and complex.
    On our approach to Dominica’s Canefield Airport, the pilot suddenly got waved off and told to land at Melville Hall Airport, way across the island to the north. The single Canefield Airport fire engine had thrown a rod, which meant the airfield had to shut down until it was fixed. From Melville Hall we were obliged to hitch a long ride back over the mountains down to Springfield Plantation, where we had reservations.
    Not to worry, I reassured Chase. In the Caribbean, when things screw up, as they always do, they usually get better.
    And indeed, our bumpy ride in a van loaded with shy but cheerful Dominicans on their way to the capital, Roseau, took us alongthe sparsely populated northeast coast, where the wind-driven surf crashed against volcanic rock, past the Carib Reserve, where the only surviving Carib Indians in the world resided, and through the wondrous Northern Forest Preserve, wild and impenetrable, the home of the endangered Sisserou and red-necked Amazon parrots, found now only here on Dominica. We wound through groves of ferns fifteen feet high, through rain forest climbing up to cloud forest and over the top, curling down the western side of the nearly five-thousand-foot-high cordillera, until finally, amazed, dazzled, we were let off at a roughly restored eighteenth-century country mansion called Springfield Plantation, within sight of the port of Roseau far below and the glittering sea.
    Springfield Plantation, a rambling hillside guesthouse with several adjacent cut-stone outbuildings, was owned and operated by an American, John Archbold (Princeton ’34), who had sailed from New Jersey to Dominica in June 1934 in his graduation present, a fifty-foot two-masted schooner, and had fallen in love with the island and never left. Eventually he became a cocoa, citrus, and coffee planter. And now a semiretired innkeeper.
    Evidently, we were the only guests at Springfield Plantation. Archbold had observed from the registry that I was employed at his alma mater, and later, when he invited us to join