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much to him anyway.
    Michel, who had become a lay minister at a Baptist church near the Rendez Vouz and never danced there, laughed as he listened. “The cock can no longer crow,” he said. “You might as well give the rest to Jesus.”
    “Jesus wouldn’t know what to do with what’s left of this man,” Dany said.
    Gone were the early-evening domino games. Gone was the phone number he’d had for the last five years, ever since he’d had a telephone. (He didn’t need other women calling him now.) And it was only as he stood in the crowd of people waiting to meet the flights arriving simultaneously from Kingston, Santo Domingo, and Port-au-Prince that he stopped worrying that he might not see any delight or recognition in his wife’s face. There, he began to feel some actual joy, even exhilaration, which made him want to leap forward and grab every woman who vaguely resembled the latest pictures she’d sent him, all of which he had neatly framed and hung on the walls of his room.
    They were searching her suitcase. Why were they searching her suitcase? One meager bag, which, aside from some gifts for her husband, contained the few things she’d been unable to part with, the things her relatives hadn’t nabbed from her, telling her that she could get more, and better, where she was going. She’d kept only her undergarments, a nightgown, and two outfits: the green princess dress she was wearing and a red jumper she’d gift-wrapped before packing so no one would take it. Neighbors who had traveled before had told her to gift-wrap everything so it wouldn’t be reopened at the airport in New York. Now the customs man was tearing her careful wrapping to shreds as he barked questions at her in mangled Creole.
    “Ki sa l ye?” He held a package out in front of her before unveiling it.
    What was it?
She didn’t know anymore. She could only guess by the shapes and sizes.
    The customs man unwrapped all her gifts—the mangoes, sugarcane, avocados, the grapefruit-peel preserves, the peanut, cashew, and coconut confections, the coffee beans, which he threw into a green bin decorated with fruits and vegetables with red lines across them. The only thing that seemed as though it might escape disposal was a small packet of trimmed chicken feathers, which her husband used to enjoy twirling in his ear cavity. In the early days, soon after he’d left, she had spun the tips of the feathers inside her ears too and discovered that from them she could get jwisans, pleasure, an orgasm. She’d thought then that maybe the foreign television programs were right: sex was mostly between the ears.
    When the customs man came across the package of feathers, he stared down at it, then looked up at her, letting his eyes linger on her face, mostly, it seemed to her, on her ears. Clearly, he had seen feathers like these before. Into the trash they went, along with the rest of her offerings.
    By the time he was done with her luggage, she had little left. The suitcase was so light now that she could walk very quickly as she carried it in one hand. She followed a man pushing a cart, which tipped and swerved under the weight of three large duffel bags. And suddenly she found herself before a door that slid open by itself, parting like a glass sea, and as she was standing there, blinking through the nearly blinding light shining down on the large number of people who had come to meet loved ones with flowers and placards and stuffed animals, the door closed again and when she moved a few steps forward it opened, and then she saw him. He charged at her and wrapped both his arms around her. And as he held her, she felt her feet leave the ground. It was when he put her back down that she finally believed she was really somewhere else, on another soil, in another country.
    He could tell she was happy that so many of her pictures were displayed on the wall facing his bed. During the ride home, he had nearly crashed the car twice. He wasn’t sure himself